Developing ways to strengthen family health, well-being Published April 19, 2012 By Shawn L. Kelley 71st Medical Group Family Advocacy Program VANCE AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- Military families face some unique challenges. They experience specific stressors that can place them at risk for maltreatment of one another. Those stressors include isolation from extended family, deployments and high levels of job stress. However, families can implement and establish protective factors that will strengthen family relationships. April is National Child Abuse Prevention month. The Vance Family Advocacy Program offers a variety of methods to help military families learn how to build positive, healthy relationships. Developing and maintaining protective factors increase the health and well-being of family members and support effective parenting and positive relationships, even under stress. There are five protective factors that are strength-based, and tend to match up with what military families want to build in their families. Those factors are parental resilience, social connections, knowledge of parenting and child development, concrete support for parents and social and emotional competence. Parental resilience requires strength and flexibility. How well do you handle the challenges, both big and small, in parenting? Parental resilience is the ability to find ways to solve problems, building and sustaining trusting relationships with your own child and knowing how to seek help when necessary. Social connections are those people you lean on or turn to when you need advice or help. It's important for parents to have support networks that help them care for themselves and their children. These connections include friends, family members, neighbors and community members. Parents need friends too. Knowledge of parenting and child development is part learned and part natural. It's important for parents to have accurate information about child development and appropriate expectations for a child's behavior. Each stage of child development can offer differing challenges. Information is available from a variety of sources including parenting classes, books, counseling or the Internet. Having appropriate expectations for your child at each age helps you see them in a positive light and promotes healthy development. Concrete support for parents is another way of saying everyone needs help sometimes. The ability to meet basic economic needs like food, shelter, clothing and health care is essential for families to thrive. When families encounter a crisis that interferes with their ability to provide these things it is essential they know how to access the needed services and supports. This allows the family to maintain stability and better ensure the safety and well-being of the family. Social and emotional competence means giving family members the love and respect they need. Parents can demonstrate and support healthy social and emotional development in children when they model how to express and communicate emotions effectively, self-regulate and make friends. A family's ability to communicate emotions and positively interact with each other as well as with those outside the family is extremely important.