Effects of war-induced maternal separation on children's adjustment during the gulf war and two years later

Military personnel deployed to the Middle East included an unprecedented number of women, many of whom were mothers. Using a structural equation modeling approach, we examined the predictors of children’s adjustment problems in data collected from a representative sample of 263 Air Force mothers 2 years after the Gulf War. Using a retrospective survey, we found that the main predictors of children’s adjustment problems at the time ofthe war were mothers ’ difficulties in providing for the care ofthe children, mothers ’ deployment in the theater of the war (vs. deployment elsewhere), and degree of change in children’s lives. Most important, war-related adjustment problems were not related to children’s adjustment 2 years later, suggesting that the effects of maternal separation during the war were transient. The large mobilization and deployment of military personnel following the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and during the Gulf War included a large number of women, many of whom were mothers with dependent children. The media soon captured the demographics of the deployment, calling the opera-tion the “Mommy War ” (Holm, 1992). By war’s end, a total of 40,793 women had served in the Persian Gulf. The Air Force alone deployed 4,246 women and nearly a third (32%) of these women had at least one dependent child. These children, who were left behind, were cared for by fathers and other relatives (U.S. Presidential Commission, 1993). Questions began to surface concerning the potential impact of the mass de-ployment on the well-being of children as the scope of mobilization increase