I originally wrote this for SOFREP.com and titled it: Deployment Doesn’t Have to Cost You Your Kids. A Navy SEAL Dad’s Guide to Staying Close.
Writing it, I realized that the same can apply to parents with incredibly demanding careers, or the single mom working two jobs and holding everything together. So when you read it, just replace military deployment with demanding job/schedule, and you’ll figure out the rest.
Hope you find it helpful.
-Brandon
I had just come off an intense combat mission hunting terrorists in the caves of northern Afghanistan. It was November 2001, not long after my deployment with SEAL Team 3 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. When we returned to base, I got the message that my first son, Jackson, had been born. Excitement hit me at the same time as fear. All I could think about was surviving this deployment long enough to make it home and meet my new family.
A few months later, in February 2002, our SEAL platoon landed at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego. Stepping off that cargo plane after months in the dust-choked mountains of Afghanistan felt surreal. One minute I was living out of a backpack in the dirt, the next, I was surrounded by running water, clean streets, and a Starbucks on every corner.
For the first few weeks at home, Gretchen wouldn’t leave me alone with our new tiny redheaded baby boy for fear I’d break him. She’s always been a very protective mama bear, and I respect her for this. Gretchen is a great mom. -Excerpt from, Puddle Jumpers
That homecoming taught me something that shaped the next twenty years of my parenting.
The bond with your kids is not automatic, and it is not permanent.
It is built, and it can erode, and the distance deployment creates is real. But this doesn’t mean you have to lose closeness and connection with your children. Like anything in life, you just have to be deliberate about it, before you leave, while you are gone, and especially when you come home.
Here is what actually works.
Before deployment: build the anchor and be honest about your job and why you have to go away.
The connection your kid holds onto while you are gone is built before you leave. Children do not process absence well in a vacuum. They fill the vacuum with whatever their imagination produces, which is usually worse than the truth. Your job before you go is to give them something concrete to hold onto.
Record yourself reading their favorite books. A young child who can press play and hear your voice at bedtime is getting something real, a piece of you they can access on their own terms while you are gone. Make enough for the whole deployment.
Remember those holiday calendars with the pop-open windows? Create a visible countdown they can control. A jar of marbles they move one at a time, a paper chain they tear a link from each day. Kids have no sense of an abstract timeline. Give them a physical one they can touch so the absence has a shape and an end.
Leave letters to be opened on specific days. Birthdays. First day of school. A random Tuesday when they miss you. Write them before you go so your presence shows up in their life on the days that matter even when you cannot.
Have the honest conversation, at their level. Tell them where you are going and why, in terms they can handle, and make sure they understand the most important thing of all...that the leaving is not about them.
Say it directly. Say it more than once. Kids respect honesty, and they can see through BS, even at a young age.
During deployment (or demanding work schedule), consistency beats intensity.
This is the principle I want every deployed parent to internalize, because it is the one that matters most and the one most people get backwards. When it comes to staying connected across distance, consistency beats intensity every single time.
A brief, reliable check-in does more for a child’s sense of security than a rare, dramatic one. Kids do not need the grand gesture. They need the reliable signal. They need to know you are still there, still thinking about them, still interested in the small ordinary details of their days even when your days look nothing like theirs.
When you do connect, stay interested in the small stuff. Ask great questions. “If this week of your life was a movie, what would it be titled as and why?”
Get specific, most parents I meet don’t ask good enough questions, they just recycle the usual plastic, “How was your day?”
Great questions get great answers, and the same applies in reverse.
The specificity of the question tells them you were actually listening, that they live in your mind even when you are on the other side of the world.
“It’s these moments that powerfully reveal the return on our investment for all those years of being a consistent parent who shows up every day.”
That line is in Puddle Jumpers, and consistency across distance is the deployed parent’s version of showing up every day.
Coming home, this is the part nobody prepares you for...
Reintegration is the hardest and least discussed phase of the whole cycle. You come home changed. The family adapted without you. Everyone is quietly pretending it is seamless and it almost never is.
(Photo: My oldest son, Jackson, on his graduation day at St. Andrews. A long way from him being born while I was chasing bad guys in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL sniper!)
Go slow. Gretchen would not leave me alone with baby Jackson for the first few weeks, and she was right to be cautious. I had been living in the dirt for months. Reentry into the rhythm of a family takes time. Do not force it. Do not expect the closeness to snap back on day one. Let it rebuild at the pace the kids and your spouse set. Ease into it or as we say in the SEAL Teams, crawl, walk, and then run.
Be present, not just home. There is a difference between being physically back and actually being there. The reintegrating parent who is home but still halfway in the operational headspace is not fully present, and kids feel that gap immediately. The hours you are physically there need to be real ones. Phone down. Head home. All the way home.
A helpful tool, visualization.
There is one technique from my SEAL sniper training that I used at every phase of the deployment cycle and that works just as well for a nervous kid as it does for an operator under pressure. Visualization.
Before a deployment, help your kid picture your return. Have them close their eyes and imagine the homecoming in detail, the airport, the hug, what you will do together first. It gives the absence a concrete, hopeful endpoint their mind can hold onto.
I write in Puddle Jumpers about teaching this to Jackson before a school speech he was terrified of, and to my daughter before a downhill ski race. The same tool that helps a kid rehearse success on a stage helps a kid rehearse the reunion at the end of a long absence. What the brain rehearses, it treats as familiar. Familiar is less frightening.
The closeness checklist.
Before: Record bedtime stories. Build a physical countdown. Write letters for specific days. Have the honest, age-appropriate conversation and make clear the leaving is not about them.
During: Prioritize consistent contact over dramatic contact. Ask about the small specific details of their life. Keep the signal reliable even when it is brief.
After: Go slow. Do not immediately reclaim your old role. Be fully present, not just physically home. Let the closeness rebuild at the kids’ pace.
Throughout: Use visualization to help them rehearse the reunion and hold onto a hopeful endpoint.
Protect it
Deploying for 6-12 months or more will strain the bond with your kids. The parent who is deliberate about connection before, during, and after can come home to children who know that they were held in your mind the entire time you were gone. That is mission success.
I came home to a four-month-old baby who did not know me. Twenty years later, that same son graduated from St. Andrews University, found me in the crowd, and told me he won the dad lottery.
The distance at the beginning did not decide the ending.
You can do the same. Whatever the mission takes you away from, the bond is worth protecting, and it is protectable.
I hope you found this useful, and if so, please share this with someone who could use it and consider buying my book here.
Over and out,
Brandon