It’s important for families of military personnel to have a healthy, stable environment in which to raise their children. Part of that environment is having both parents at home sharing the numerous responsibilities that come with child rearing.

But when one family member is deployed overseas it becomes an arduous task for the remaining parent to assume the responsibilities of his or her spouse. When you throw into the equation a deployment to a combat zone, and that family environment takes on an immeasurable stress factor.

“The relationship of the child to both parents is extremely important,” said Janice R. Witte, director of the Office of Children and Youth for the Department of Defense (DOD). “When one parent is gone, the remaining parent is playing a lot of roles.”

Each parent has a job to do in raising children. Witte said that when one parent is away, the other parent picks up his or her job. And because money is tight, oftentimes the remaining parent must work to make end’s meet. That means the remaining parent is donning the responsibilities of three jobs — mother, father and occupation.

“That increases the stress and decreases the time that you can spend with your children, supporting them in their schools and activities,” Witte said.

For working parents, whose spouses are overseas, finding quality daycare and after school programs for their children is a very critical factor in their day-to-day lives. For families living off base, that can pose a dilemma, Witte said.

For military families living off base, the problems with finding quality day care facilities mirror those of the overall U.S. society.

“When you’re not close to an installation, there are not as many options in the civilian world because, as a nation, we don’t have the number of quality spaces that are needed to handle people,” Witte said.

There isn’t the flexibility with the hours so that if a child needs care early in the morning, or late in the evening, or on the weekends, or if parents just need it temporarily because they have appointments, there isn’t a plethora of places that offer that type of care, she pointed out.

Military parents that do live off base are eligible to use the daycare facilities located on the installations, Witte said.

“We serve about 200,000 children [newborn to age 12] a day on base, and we are adamant that we talk about the total system of care,” she said.

Among the programs offered by the installations:

· Child Development Centers at more than 300 locations provide childcare for children 6 weeks to 12 years of age. The National Academy of Early Childhood Programs, a division of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, accredits about 95 percent of DOD centers.

· Family Child Care (FCC) programs consist of in-home care offered by certified providers living in government-owned or leased housing. There are more than 9,000 licensed and trained FCC providers. Families rely upon FCC to provide flexible childcare to include night, weekend and unusual hourly care such as shift work. FCC provides about 32 percent of the DOD childcare capacity.

· Resource and Referral (R&R) Programs are available at most military bases. Many offer referrals to childcare in the local community. Since it is impossible to meet 100 percent of the need on the installation, R&R services are critical to the DOD’s ability to refer families to quality childcare off the base when care is unavailable on base.

· School-Age Care (SAC) Programs are offered for children (ages 6 to 12 years) before and/or after school, during holidays, and summer vacations.

The problem is if a family lives many miles off base, it may not be convenient to use the installation’s daycare facilities. That forces parents to search their communities for a quality facility. That is not always easy, Witte said.

The cost of daycare varies greatly depending where you’re located, Witte said. Childcare is less expensive in the Southeast than in the Northeast, for example.

“If you move from place to place, it is hard to predict and to budget for these different scenarios,” Witte said.

Generally speaking, in the civilian world, parents pay more for care for infants and toddlers than for older children.

“Many of our families are young and they have infants and toddlers,” she said. “Their care isn’t subsidized.”

At DOD-operated facilities, the fees are uniform for all services.

“We don’t charge more for younger children,” Witte noted.

Off-Base Difficulties

But if families live so far off base, it becomes impractical for them to use the DOD-operated childcare facilities. Many times, it’s difficult to find accredited childcare facilities off base.

“We’re just not talking about child development centers. We try to use a variety programs,” Witte said. “There are more options for families living on base. That isn’t always the case off base.”

While that has always been an issue, it has been become more magnified since the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, with the thousands of deployed personnel to Afghanistan and Iraq, including a great number of Reserve and National Guard members. Family members of the Guard and Reserve find themselves in the same situation as the families of Active Duty members.

“That has been a challenge,” Witte pointed out. “We have a contract with a national organization for off-installation spaces to meet the greater number of childcare needs. That organization is having challenges finding centers that are accredited. The licensing standards are significantly different throughout the 50 states. Being accredited is like having the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”

Christine Hughes has seen the challenges of childcare up close. As the mother of two boys and a girl, ranging in age from 3 to 7, Hughes has had her children in three different facilities in California during the past four years.

Hughes and her children live about 20 miles off base in California as her husband Ron, who has more than 10 years of service in the U.S. Army, has participated in multiple deployments to Iraq. The family moved nearer the base in late 2002 when Ron first got his overseas orders. (Their youngest child was born in April 2003.)

She said she would prefer not to have made so many childcare moves but felt it necessary because she believed the quality of childcare was not what she expected.

“I felt the attention given to my children was not what it should have been,” said Hughes, who works a fulltime job in addition to raising her children. “I know it was difficult on the kids because they didn’t understand why I was doing it. All they knew was I was taking them away from their friends.”

Hughes said it added to what was already a stressful situation at home.

“Taking my kids out of childcare once was hard enough; when I had to do it a second time, it was extremely difficult,” she said. “They miss their father something awful and when I had to take them out of the second childcare facility, all they wanted was their father.”

Chance Meeting Solves the Problem

Fortunately for Hughes and her children, the third time was the charm as far as daycare facilities go. Her two youngest are in the facility all day and her oldest, who recently completed second grade, is in the after school program.

She said she was able to find the new facility after a chance meeting with a fellow military spouse who had similar difficulties with childcare. The spouse raved to Hughes about the quality of the teachers and the staff and how much more comfortable she felt dropping her children off at this facility compared with her previous facility.

After doing a little more investigating, and touring the facility herself, Hughes was convinced she had finally found the right facility.

“My kids are happy and I’m happy,” she noted.

Hughes described the past three years as the most stressful of her life. There is the constant worrying about the safety of her husband Ron, the double duty of being mother and father to her three children, working a fulltime job, and making sure the children are at their various activities at the right time.

“This has been the hardest experience in my life,” she said. “It really hasn’t gotten easier and I don’t expect that it will until Ron comes home for good.”

But at least the daycare situation has been resolved.

“It’s a load off of my mind,” she pointed out. “It’s one less thing to worry about.

Witte said finding an accredited, high-quality childcare facility is critical for military families living off base.

“These parents are trying to keep their children on the most normal schedule possible so there is stability,” she said. “And they are trying to do this without assistance.”

Tricia Hyland is a freelance writer based in Cleveland, Ohio.