How do families with young children cope with deployments? There's plenty of advice out there that can be helpful. Army spouse and mother Rebekah Sanderlin, who writes the 'Operation Marriage' blog for The Fayetteville Observer, has come up with a few seemingly small but, she insists, important tips to help cope with family separations after dealing more than a half-dozen deployments. She recently told the Armed Forces Press Service:
Meantime, Helium blogger Suzanne Rose has some sound advice of her own:
As for Elaine Connor, a blogger and the mother of three whose husband is in the Army National Guard and has been deployed three times, she says her family will make it through this latest deployment, which will last a year, because her children are strong and can deal with "whatever life throws at them." Among the things she does to help cope with her husband's absence is write poetry:
