Parent-Adolescent Relationships in Military Families Affected by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

The mostly quantitative studies to date on the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on family functioning have involved comparing veterans suffering from PTSD with other categories of veterans, by examining psychiatric records, administering self-report instruments, and/or conducting structured interviews. This paper augments these findings with a thematic analysis of intensive semi-structured interviews that were carried out in 2009/10 with adolescent children of members of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). These adolescents attended the high school in "Armyville," a community that experienced several deployments to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2012. As part of a large, mixed-methods study, we focused on eight of the 17 (out of a total of 61) interview participants who indicated that their fathers or stepfathers had been afflicted with PTSD, in order to explore and discuss the key themes that emerged from their interviews: parental emotional unavailability, parentification, isolation, and school-based extrafamilial support. As illustrated by our interview participants, parentification, being a young carer, and acting out comprise three responses to the destabilizing of family dynamics that often accompanies parental PTSD. We conclude with suggestions for further research and for enhanced school support for adolescents affected by parental PTSD.