Challenges facing married couples in the deploying units of South African National Defence Force

Bibliography: leaves 65-69.Military families are often forced to adjust to changes imposed by military demands. These demands often deprive the soldier of the opportunity of attending to 'personal and family relationships and responsibilities. Military demands often require the soldier to be away from their families. Deployment is one of the major factors that require changes in the family functioning. The changes brought by deployment often cause stress to the family members.1he impact of stress experienced is often determined by the family's preparedness for separation and/or the life cycle of that particular family as it is believed that young couples and families with young children are more vulnerable to deployment stress. Prolonged and enforced military separations have a profound impact on military families. Military families, unlike civilian families, often share the same characteristics as they are often exposed to the same vulnerabilities. Characteristics of the life style of military families include risk of injury or death of the soldier in the course of his/her duty and periodic separation of the soldier from the rest of his family. Many studies revealed that military families are vulnerable to stress as a result of military demands. This resulted to number of programmes designed to help military families cope better with the stress. Social work officers in the military units ate behind the implementation of these programmes. Deployment resilience seminars are one of these programmes designed to help the soldier and his family to survive during the deployment period. This study, amongst other objectives, evaluates the effectiveness of those programmes rendered to soldiers and their families. The study revealed that military families are exposed to a great deal of stress as a result of military demands. The impact of separation due to deployment has a direct effect on children, mothers and fathers. Although there was no interviews done with children the information obtained from the parents showed that children are also the hardest hit in the process. It has been proved,for example by Rosenfeld et al (1973) that the absence of father in the child is often detrimental to the child's development. There were many similarities between wives and husbands experiences to challenges of separation due to deployments. These include the loneliness, boredom, sexual frustration, separation etc. However it was interesting to find that the couples also acknowledged the benefits of separation due to deployment