The Dandelion Myth
Visit any Defence or veteran institution across the world and you will find variations of the same story told about military children. We are resilient. We are fine. Nothing to see here.
From Canada’s Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families: “We celebrate the strength, perseverance and resilience of military children…Like the dandelions that thrive wherever they are carried by the wind, military children often journey in various directions and flourish where they land.”
This narrative is meant to be a positive celebration. But this kind of resilience- washing silences truth and tells Defence-connected children who they are expected to be.
That the dandelion is the metaphor used to describe us speaks volumes. Other children can be hothouse flowers needing nurturance and care, military children are expected to be as tough as weeds and capable of flourishing in barren soil. When the story being sold is that you “thrive wherever you are carried,” no one looks too closely at the reality behind the myth.
The Reality Behind the Myth
Many reports mention the key role families play in veteran and serving member wellbeing. But the reality of what this can mean, and the toll this can take on veteran children, is far less discussed. If we did care to look, we would find many children of veterans growing up in homes shaped by untreated PTSD, addiction, mental illness, anger, volatility, withdrawal and absence. In any other context, this would be recognised as serious childhood trauma. But in Defence families, this is spoken of as “the ups and downs of military family life.”
I am the child of a Vietnam veteran who had untreated PTSD. Since Penguin published the memoir I wrote about my experience in 2016, I have been regularly contacted by adult children of veterans spanning different generations and conflicts. Many share stories of challenging childhoods strikingly similar to mine.
Over the past ten years I have heard repeated stories of being treated like soldiers instead of children, learning from a young age to be tuned to the mood of their parent instead of themselves, and living with the constant pressure of adapting their behaviour on the fly to manage parent volatility or swallowing their needs or emotions in order to avoid setting their parent off. I have heard of unrelenting anger and fear, complete disengagement, fractured family relationships, walking on eggshells, and role reversal that has extended well beyond childhood.
So why, given how many millions of veteran children exist in the world, and the similarities of our experience growing up in homes with PTSD-impacted parents, do we remain so invisible? Why are we not recognised as a survivor cohort in our own right?
The Silence We Are Trained to Keep
Since I published my book, children who grew up in homes shaped by their parent’s military experience, from countries all over the world, have reached out to me because my book is the first time they have read about an experience like theirs. It is the first time they have realised it wasn’t just them. What I have come to realise is, the conditioning of our childhoods has trained us to stay quiet.
We often have a lingering fear of getting in trouble, rocking the boat, or making things worse. We have been trained from birth not to be burdens, to sideline our own needs in service to the family unit. Many of us still operate within dysfunctional family structures, where trauma has not been dealt with, historical hurts are unaddressed and there is no capacity for open discussion. Our family relationships are often already stretched to breaking point.
We also live in a society where, while real support for the humans who are served in the military is inadequate, the narrative of “the veteran” is sacrosanct. In publicly talking about the violence and neglect I experienced growing up I have been called disrespectful, accused of malice, and been challenged after a speaking event about my “crocodile tears”.
I have had people respond with indignation that I would dare to share a story that might affect the cardboard-cut-out-veteran-hero story politicians so love to get behind on ANZAC Day. They seem to perceive me naming of my own reality as an attempt to deny my father’s service-related suffering, instead of an act of truth-telling to correct a narrative that has erased military children for generations as bearers of their own scars of service.
My intention has never been to hurt those who serve. Every person who sacrificed for their country deserves to receive all the support they need for their service. But disrupting the unbreakable hero narrative? That is for the good in my opinion. No veteran needs that sort of unachievable ideal to live up to or impede them from reaching out for support.
The Research Gap
Though often obscured through the use of euphemistic language, there has been a pattern of war trauma transferring from veteran parent to child since the time war began. But while research into veterans has become ever more nuanced, research into the impacts of military service carried by Defence children remains notably thin.
Studies into children from Defence families are often constrained by the concept that the main challenge children of veterans face is related to being moved around a lot. While this can have a serious impact, it is not the only issue we face. It amazes me that institutions and systems seem so certain of our resilience when they haven’t adequately explored the specifics of our childhood experience that made our resilience necessary.
I also question the capacity to measure the resilience of veteran children when most studies into veteran children are age-limited and tied to their status as a dependent. Whether someone survives a childhood is not a measure of resilience. Whether they thrive afterwards, is.
It can take decades to understand, process and feel the full impacts of the kind of childhood trauma many veteran children experience. Yet the lack of recognition or support services that exists for adult children of veterans seems to reflect an assumption that the impact of growing up in a military family is minimal and ends as soon as we are not living with our parents.
The few studies that are available on veteran children show those who grew up in military families experience high rates of mental health, trauma and related problems compared to those growing up in civilian families. Without research into how we are faring 10, 20, 30, 40 years post-childhood, the nature and impacts of our experiences on our life trajectories will not be understood. If we don’t adequately measure mental health, wellbeing, relationship, education and socioeconomic data of veteran children through their life course, we will never have a clear picture of the price they have paid for the burden they have carried, or whether this is something we actually bounce back from.
The Institutional Non-Response
Over the ten years I have been advocating in this space, I have reached out to many people. DVA. Defence. ESOs. The organisations who allegedly support and value veteran children. While some small organisations have been supportive, the larger systems that hold the power to make meaningful change in this space have responded with silence.
I have spent years scratching my head at the lack of engagement. Do these systems actually believe that veteran children are more resilient than other children? Is there a concern that in prioritising children of veterans, we will remove funding from already underfunded veteran support services? Are systems deliberately trying to avoid knowing the extent of the damage that can be caused from growing up in a military household because no one wants to be accountable?
Despite our substantially higher suicide rates and lifelong mental health impacts, no one seems to want to treat children of veterans with the potential life or death seriousness they warrant. So veteran children, who carry scars long after childhood has ended, continue to suffer in silence. Veteran children, and the adults we grow into, are a problem no one wants to acknowledge, because, apparently, we are flourishing wherever we land.
Veteran children deserve to be seen, studied and supported. Our parents deserve parenting and family support programs and services that acknowledge the full cost of service on the whole family. And the institutions that claim to value military families need to demonstrate their value with something more than silence.
