(Air1 Closer Look) – Soldiers join the military expecting to move around for duty. If they have families, their kids are uprooted with mom or dad every time new orders arrive. “Military families are consistently switching between deployed life and reintegration,” explains Dale Mace of Youth For Christ Military. He has seen the stress of moving every 1-3 years make teens “appear more mature than their civilian peers” – but he says, don’t let that fool you. “Those youth have few deep friends or long-lasting relationships with friends or adults.”
“They're always saying goodbye or they're always the ones being left.”
YFCM invites military-connected children ages 11-19 yrs to day camps, Bible studies, game nights, pizza parties and pep rallies. Participants are under no obligation to ‘join’ anything and there is no requirement to believe in God. The teen only needs to be interested in fun and friendship. Any child of a soldier is welcome and there are more than 570,000 children in military families stationed across the globe.
The YFCM volunteers strive to connect with these often unseen, overlooked kids. Knowing they will just be leaving again in a year makes some kids rebellious. Some turn to addiction saying, “what’s the point?” Still others jump into the new duty station with a sort of frantic FOMO – an unhealthy ‘fear of missing out.’
“We choose to go and pursue those kids,” says Mace, himself a former youth pastor. “We show up at every event that we can -- especially through school, whether it's athletics or drama, some clubs that they are involved in -- whatever those things are we will try to be there to support them.”
