Family resiliency training with active duty military families and children: The FOCUS Project's experience

About 1.2 million US children have an active-duty military parent, with more than 50,000 military families including two active-duty parents. Resiliency in military families is the norm, but long and multiple deployments over the past eight years are taking a toll not only on the service member on the front lines, but on family members on the “homefront”. Child behavioral problems and other indicators of distress have increased among military families. To help address this, FOCUS (Families OverComing Under Stress) provides family-centered resiliency training to Marine and Navy families and children at nine military installations in the US and Japan through a contract from the US Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED). Using the Combat Operational Stress Continuum developed by the US Marine Corps and a public health approach to match family need with tiered early intervention, FOCUS provides secondary prevention services. The demonstration project has reached more than twenty-five thousand military service members and their families with FOCUS information and more than 600 have participated in direct services, including multi-session programming to support family and child well-being. A description of the evidence-based FOCUS intervention adapted for military families, project implementation and outputs, and areas of unmet service need will be discussed.