Growing Up in Armyville
Canada's Military Families during the Afghanistan Mission
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
It was 2006, and eight hundred soldiers from the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) base in pseudonymous “Armyville,” Canada, were scheduled to deploy to Kandahar. Many students in the Armyville school district were destined to be affected by this and several subsequent deployments. These deployments, however, represented such a new and volatile situation that the school district lacked—as indeed most Canadians lacked—the understanding required for an optimum organizational response. Growing Up in Armyville provides a close-up look at the adolescents who attended Armyville High School (AHS) between 2006 and 2010. How did their mental health compare with that of their peers elsewhere in Canada? How were their lives affected by the Afghanistan mission—at home, at school, among their friends, and when their parents returned with post-traumatic stress disorder? How did the youngsters cope with the stress? What did their efforts cost them? Based on questions from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, administered to all youth attending AHS in 2008, and on in-depth interviews with sixty-one of the youth from CAF families, this book provides some answers. It also documents the partnership that occurred between the school district and the authors’ research team. Beyond its research findings, this pioneering book considers the past, present, and potential role of schools in supporting children who have been affected by military deployments. It also assesses the broader human costs to CAF families of their enforced participation in the volatile overseas missions of the twenty-first century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harrison and Albanese's groundbreaking work is a meticulous, accessible examination of a New Brunswick military town's home-front reactions to the deployment of troops in Canada's longest war, the occupation of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2011. This collaborative academic study is an engaging history that contextualizes the war while analyzing the often devastating effect of the soldiers' overseas deployment on their children and spouses. The book is bolstered by extensive, frequently heartbreaking firsthand stories of soldiers' adolescent children, who, in addition to typical teen-years stressors, must also deal with the effects of school transfers, new responsibilities as parent substitutes, and fears, anxieties and depression triggered by knowing a loved one is in a war zone. It also shows loved ones trying to deal with veterans' PTSD, catastrophic physical injuries, and other difficult readjustments after life in a combat zone. Out of the mouths of babes come remarkably perceptive insights that the study's authors clearly hope will be heard by policy makers who decide when to go to war. The book also documents recommendations on how to assist families in case of future military entanglements but concludes that the momentum generated by the study's findings when they were first publicized in 2011 has, unfortunately, led to little overall progress.
