What do American children experience when their fathers or mothers go to war - and when they come home?
More than 2.7 million American children have a parent who served in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria. As our country’s all-volunteer military represents just 0.4 percent of the population, there is wide gap between those who go to war and those who don't. This has resulted in a lack in understanding about how war affects not only the soldiers on the battlefront but also their families and children on the homefront.
Veteran Children: When Parents Go To War is a documentary film that illuminates the struggles, strengths, and perspectives of America's military families and children. The film provides a unique lens as they tell us their own stories in their own words. The film promotes understanding of war's effects on all who serve and sacrifice. While the wars are over, the effects on veterans, military families and children are not. We use the film to advocate for quality mental health services for military families impacted by war. This need continues as military service requires deployments to conflict zones around the world. Why do these stories matter? When our 9/11 wars officially ended in August, 2020, it marked 20 years of war, the longest wars in our nation's history. Only 0.4 percent of our population served in those wars, requiring service members to deploy over and over; sometimes a single deployment lasted more than a year without returning home to their families. These long absences take a toll on everyone. Children miss their parents, fear for their safety, suffer anxiety, depression, withdrawal, and more. The emotional and psychological effects are significant. Yet, this is largely invisible to families whose loved ones and parents do not serve in the military or did not go to our wars. Our film informs the civilian public how military families and children are impacted by war. It is based on candid conversations with military families and children and experts in the field of deployment trauma. We made the film so that people can listen to these stories, learn from them, and connect to them. We made it to help bridge the military-civilian divide. The film encourages all Americans to learn about and talk about war's impact on military families. What inspired the film project? This project was started in 2013 by the mother of a combat veteran of the Iraq war, Susan Hackley, who wanted to bring attention to and have discussions about the impacts of war. After a successful Kickstarter fundraising campaign, Susan partnered with an esteemed documentary filmmaker to interview military children to produce a film trailer. Martha White Jackson, another mother of a combat veteran, joined the team and helped produce our short film, Veteran Kids, which features teenagers from military and non-military backgrounds discussing what it is like to have a parent go to war. It screened at numerous university campuses and film festivals, winning awards. Together, they completed the half-hour documentary, Veteran Children: When Parents Go To War, which gives voice and visibility to a broad cross-section of military children and families who share how war affects those at home. The film premiered on Indianapolis Public Television WFYI on April 18th, 2019. It was selected to screen at over twenty film festivals in the U.S. and around the world, receiving over a dozen film awards. In 2020 it was nominated for a Regional Emmy Award. The film screened at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC. and The National World War II Museum in New Orleans on Veteran’s Day. Where do we want to show our film? Going forward, we continue to seek opportunities to show the film at veterans service organizations, military family support organizations, companies and conferences, places of worship, community groups, theatres and on television. We want to share it at middle schools, high schools and universities, as we’ve witnessed how eager young people are to talk about the individual stories in the film and the important issues it raises. |
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Some of the film awards for "Veteran Children: When Parents Go to War", our 30-minute documentary that is the centerpiece of the Veteran Children Project
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Film awards for "Veteran Kids" our six-minute film created as a part of the Veteran Children Project
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Creative Visions Foundation is the proud fiscal agent of Veteran Children.
Creative Visions Foundation is a publicly supported 501©3,
which supports Creative Activists who use the power of media
and the arts to affect positive change in the world. All donations are tax deductible.
Creative Visions Foundation is a publicly supported 501©3,
which supports Creative Activists who use the power of media
and the arts to affect positive change in the world. All donations are tax deductible.