When I graduated University of Southern California in May of 2014, I was so ashamed of my 2.59 GPA, I didn’t even want my parents to fly to California to see me walk on Graduation Day. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my Bachelor’s in Social Sciences; and in fact, I didn't have any further plans beyond that point. I tried applying to this program, months before graduation, but got cold feet. I also tried searching for a job in California, but that also failed and I was forced to move back with my parents in South Carolina. I had no car of my own, therefore, it would be ten times harder to find and keep a job in a small town with my kind of degree, and with no public transportation. My mom recommended a part-time job; she works at …show more content…
According to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, there are five different levels of environmental systems that affect human development. When these systems change in any way, it can have a big impact on a child’s growth. Unfortunately, a military child’s environment is constantly changing. For example, if a parent is deployed, this can cause changes in the hierarchy of the home in order to fill in the gap of the missing parent. Military families also often get orders to move, so the military child has to transition to new schools more often than nonmilitary children. A study conducted by USC and Israel’s Bar-Ilan University found that military youth reported having a variety of more problems than their nonmilitary counterparts. Even with so much research done, policy is still not where we want it to be. Consequently, when my family was stationed to Laurel Bay, it was the hardest move I’d ever had to make. I had to go to a public school, where they were on completely different topics than my old school. Being bullied because of my Californian accent and the way I dressed made it hard to make friends. This was also the first time I moved and I wasn’t placed in a Military base school. While that was nearly 10 years ago, and much as changed, there is still more we need to …show more content…
Tamika D. Gilreath’s research has explored mental health disparities in African-American youth, and has recently done a study where she and her team linked suicide and depression to be more common in military students than nonmilitary students. I would love to take it a further and compare African American and military youth. My thesis is that since African Americans have the highest percentage of single-parent households, their microenvironment resembles that of military children. With single parent households, a child’s environment could be constantly changing with less parental supervision at home, possible step-parents, or even more responsibility given to the oldest child. Therefore, researching how families with these disadvantages could also benefit from programs designed for military families could also benefit the whole school system. I want to help change the narrative on how some adults label children as “bad” just because they have behavior problems, when really there are underlying