BTM54-Connecting Military Families Through Reading

Welcome to Episode 54 of Behind The Mission, a show that sparks conversations with PsychArmor’s trusted partners and educational experts. My name is Duane France, and each week I'll be having conversations with podcast guests that will equip you with tools and resources to effectively engage with and support military service members, Veterans, and their families. Find the show on all the podcast players by going to www.psycharmor.org/podcast.

Thanks again for joining us on Behind The Mission. Our work and mission are supported by generous partnerships and sponsors, who also believe that education changes lives. This episode is brought to you by PsychArmor, the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military cultural content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory that's free to individual learners as well as custom training options for organizations. You can find more about PsychArmor at www.psycharmor.org.

On today's episode, I'm having a conversation with Josie Beets, Senior Vice President of Advancement for United Through Reading, a 30-year-old organization that connects military families who are separated for deployment or military assignment by providing the bonding experience of shared story type. Josie has more than 12 years of experience in the nonprofit and public sectors. Before joining the staff, she served United Through Reading (UTR) as Vice-Chair of the United through Reading board of trustees. Josie is an attorney, an army spouse, and mom to two insatiable readers. In 2013, Josie discovered United Through Reading when her spouse was deployed to Afghanistan. You can find out more about Josie by checking out her bio in our show notes, let's get into my conversation with her and come back afterward to talk about some of the key points.

DUANE: On the show, we love to highlight the work that's being done by great organizations that support service members, Veterans, and their families, and the mission of United Through Reading is definitely crossing all of those sectors in the military-affiliated community. What I'm interested in hearing about is the story behind the mission. Why working with United Through Reading is important to you and how you got involved.

JOSIE: Absolutely. So I'm an Army Spouse. My husband and I've been married since 2008. In 2013, he deployed out of the hundred and out of Fort Campbell. I had a one-year-old and a three. And it was a whole new army experience for us, uh, deployment time apart with two little ones at home. And so I ended up finding out that there was a United Through Reading story station at the fob that he was deployed to. And what that meant was he could go into basically what was slightly larger than a closet type of space, record a video of himself reading a book to our children and then send that book and the recording home to us. And I thought what a great way to connect. He was always doing storytime at night at home. And so this is a great way for us to keep up that routine. I told him about it and we didn't talk about it again, ever. Then three weeks later, a book and a DVD showed up in the mail and we wore that sucker out and we watched it every night. It was part of our routine. It was 20 minutes at night where I was not in charge of parenting, which was fantastic. I knew of United Through Reading through that. We then subsequently Permanent Change of Station (PCS) to DC. I met some folks there and I met the team at United Through Reading. They were looking to add to their board. And so I joined their board because sometimes when you get excited about a topic, you ended up doing crazy things like being on the board of things that you're passionate about. So I served on the board of United Through Reading for three years, helping do all the things that you do when you're on a board: help the strategic direction, talk about the mission, encourage folks to use the program. Then, I had the opportunity to move over to the staff side, to work as the Senior Vice President of Advancement. So running marketing communications and fundraising for the organization, I tell folks I get to talk about how families can connect through reading all day. It is the dream job. And so that is what brought me to United Through Reading. UTR is a 30 year old organization. We started on the peers of San Diego, a military spouse, problem-solvers. We are saw that when her husband came home from a long deployment on the ship, their 18-month-old did not recognize him and was like, who is this stranger who is now living in our home mom? And of course, breaks everyone's hearts. And I think everyone can feel how much that can just break the heart of the military member and the spouse and the family. So she started recording the sailors as they went on the ship, reading a book and then taking that big old VHS tape and the book home to the families. 32 years later, United Through Reading does essentially the same thing. We focus on connection and we focus on literacy. Our technology has changed slightly. We no longer use the giant cam quarters and the big brick tapes. We have SD cards that we send out on the ships with tablets, and we also have a mobile reading app that families can download from their favorite app store and download and start reading together.

DUANE: Having been in that situation in Iraq and Afghanistan and wanting to connect with family and we'll talk a little bit about that, but you talk about how it wasn't just beneficial for your children, that they got to hear dad reading the story. It was beneficial for you, that you were able to put something on and get a 20-minute break. But it was also beneficial for him because he got to go in this slightly larger than a closet. I mean, this was a break for him from his deployment duties, which is just as critical as a break for you in your parenting duties, that it was really supportive forever.

JOSIE:That's such an important point. And we hear about this from our service members, even today, when you know, folks aren't necessarily going out in large scale, on combat deployments right now. And we still have folks that are deploying all the time. So I don't, I'm not discounting that, but it's so important to be able to step away from the military side of stuff for the service member and not really taking a knee, but just connect back home and remember your why about why you're doing this. And remember that there, there is a support system back home that's thinking about me. We hear that all the time from our folks. So, we are actually releasing a podcast of our own limited series podcast, just three episodes, but talking about reading routines and one of our service member participants in the podcast talks about, he organized a United Through Reading story station on his ship and he got a Boatswain’s Mate set up to do his recording. And he talks about how he's this big burly guy with fist, the size of my head. And then he closes the door and it's sitting outside doing his work while he's recording a story in there and can hear this big, giant weapon of American. Use his little princess voice. Yeah. So it's, it is so important and it is such a benefit to the service members that we, we hear that all the time and it really makes our heart sing because we do talk about the benefit to kids a lot. Right. Because our military kids are focused. Oh, my gosh, that positive experience for service members is that important to you.

DUANE: And again, a positive experience for the spouses, right? This is definitely during the height of the deployments. We talk about the changes in military families, but you go from a dual-parent to a single-parent situation just because that's the way deployment life is. You're the mom, you're the dad, you're the plumber, you're the everything. And then for the military spouse. One, you have this feeling of your big burly weapon of America doing all the princess voices and that's amusing to you, but there's the respite on the side of the military spouses that gives them a break.

JOSIE: Yeah. You know, our families, our spouses do the heavy lifting back home. And so having any type of connection or respite is super important. Also, I think that we can't discount we don't talk about it maybe as much as we should, but it's also comfort to that spouse to see and hear their service member in a safe place, talking in a way that is kid-appropriate, kid fun that you don't necessarily get when you're doing those calls from a forward location where it's really like all business. And you're not necessarily connecting on that personal level as much as you'd like to. It's really a benefit to the wellness of the spouse to see their service members safe as well.

DUANE: Yeah, I can imagine that. I think, and especially over the last 20 years, the increase in the frequency of the deployments also coincided with that increase in connectivity. I served in the mid to early nineties in the early part of when UTR had started, I was in Bosnia and I wasn't married at the time, but I was writing letters to my mother and my sisters. I was maybe I had a phone call, but it, there was no even is recently, so to speak as 30 years ago, there was nowhere near the almost instantaneous connection that we had in the two-thousands, especially late two thousands in the teens. It can be both beneficial and detrimental, as you were just talking about. There were times where my wife's like, what is going on in the background? And I'm like one, I can't tell you and two, I need to go. But how have you seen the use of technology in that frequency of communication change how UTR connects families over the last 15, 20 years?

JOSIE: The prevalence of Skype and FaceTime and all those sorts of things are just such a huge benefit to our modern military family. To be able to see your service member, that there are those positives and there are those negatives where, you know, I remember a particular time when my husband was on that same Afghanistan deployment while I had the three-year-old, and the one-year-old, it was Christmas. And he was Skyping us from the MWR center there and you could hear things happening and he said, exactly what you said, “I gotta go.” And then when he came back using like the full, get his helmet and full battle rattle. It was great to see him, but the kids were like, why are you wearing all this stuff now? You know, lots of questions came up. So Skype's a double-edged sword. I also had a three-year-old and a one-year-old. They didn't really interact very well on Skype. It's hard to have a conversation and maybe kids are a little bit better about that now. That was eight, nine years ago. But the benefit of United Through Reading compared to something like Skype, is it is mommy and daddy on demand. And so whenever you need to hear that voice, you can play that video on your mobile device. You can pop that DVD and you can watch that video on your computer. Even if mom and dad aren't available. We hear spouses now who have service members who go on frequent TDY, for example. And their kids will want to watch videos of daddy during the day cause they just miss him. So those are things that we offer at United Through Reading. We also are really specific about how we use reading to connect rather than just conversation to connect and the importance of reading in supporting the educational development of military kids. We know good reading skills have out-sized positive impacts on your educational learning lifelong. And so we really are working hard to educate military families on why reading as a family together, both as a routine, and then using United Through Reading to keep that routine going when your military duty takes you away is so important to maintaining military family readyiness.

DUANE: And also it's good family development. It's good child development, right? This is good psychology development. Your one-year-old likely didn't remember daddy reading the stories unless you're watching the videos many years later because pre-verbal memory is not fully formed, but the attachment that a parent has with their child is very critical at that time. And then again, like you were saying, kids with books in the home have better educational outcomes later on down the road. I was a first-generation college student and many service members are not necessarily had that growing up. And so we know the military is a way to step things up, educationally socioeconomically, but this is a way to pass that along to the next generation.

JOSIE: Absolutely even today, you know, there's always going to be something to do other than reading together. We have some anecdotal information we talked to folks. They're like, we sit down at night, we watch YouTube videos together, or like, I'm glad you're spending time together. So fantastic. But let's talk about why reading is important and why those connections, discovering characters together through books, discovering new adventures through books is so important to maintaining that family unit and, that connection between folks.

DUANE: No, and I think it's very critical again, as my kids were in kindergarten and first grade when I started to deploy and they were approaching high school when I stopped. So just that transition is very critical. But now that the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly over, many people may think that there might be less of a need for a program like UTR. But as you mentioned, there are frequently TDYs in peace time service, there's a significant amount of family separation. What are some of the programs that United Through Reading is doing now? You mentioned the app. What are you looking at as far as support for military families moving forward says the next 10 or 15 years?

JOSIE: Yeah, absolutely. We do have our mobile reading app that anybody can download and use today. We have eBooks in that app. So for example, if you're a service member who is currently away from your family, you can download that today. Record one of our e-books in the app, send it to your family and we'll send the physical book to the families so they can follow along. Getting physical books into the hands of kids is a core value of what we do at United Through Reading. And so you can go on our webpage and request a free book, and we'll send you a free book today to get started with your United Through Reading library. We also recognize we are 98% military spouses and Veterans are on our employee side. And so we know that separations due to military service, aren't just deployments. We know it's those TDYs, it's those three-month assignments. It's sometimes it's geo batching because uh, move, does it line up with the end of the school year. And so we really encourage folks to use United Through Reading, to build a United Through Reading video library of storytime so that they're prepared for events like that. Especially our national guard and reserve families. We've done really specific outreach to those communities over the past three or four years and seeing big growth in national guard involvement in our program. Because we know they go away for drill weekends and that's a weekend without mom or dad. And you can use United Through Reading to stay connected through that time. And we've seen more frequent mobilizations of those national guard folks with COVID and some of the unrest that's happened over the past two years, and we don't want those families to lose those connections just because those folks are serving their country and their state and their communities. And so really United Through Reading is for every day. Just like how reading is for every day. We are about that connection and that literacy supports for military kids. And so we know that just because we've seen those drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're still a present need to support these families and keeping them together through reading.

DUANE: And it's not necessarily just for the core military family. I'm thinking about, we were stationed in Colorado. We now live in Colorado kids, grandparents. My parents are in Missouri. My wife's parents are in Tennessee. So one of the aspects of a military family is you remove yourself from your family of origin. So this is a way for families of origin to connect to say their grandchildren, nieces, nephews. It's not just for the military parents.

JOSIE: Absolutely. And actually, our app is available for active-duty component folks and for Veterans. So if you're a Veteran, you can download our app and you sign in through troop ID, just like you do for some of your military discounts with retailers. And you can record a story and send it to your grandkids. We are really excited about the fact that we can serve the Veteran community in addition to the active duty and national guard and reserve community. And so we love to see folks reading to their grandkids and it's really about connecting with the special kids in your life. It doesn't have to be your kids. It's reading to them as we said before, step away from the fight or step away from your military duty for a moment, and remember your broader community that supports you and a way to brighten up a child's life for a day plus. And so we're so excited to see folks reading to their friends, kids to their grandkids, to cousins, to brothers and sisters. We have a family right now who have, I think five kids. Dad has been on multiple deployments and a year away in Korea and things like that. And his they've used United Through Reading extensively and have seen it support their kids' educational development who've been struggling with reading issues and dyslexia. Their oldest has now joined the Navy. And now he uses United Through Reading to send stories and books to his brothers and sisters. And so with that generational reading practice gets us really excited here at United Through Reading.

DUANE: No, I think that's a great point. And that was actually something that I was going to bring up is that so often the military has become a family job. My father was a Vietnam Veteran, both me and my younger brothers are Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans. So we're, multi-generational. Like many service members and veterans, I can trace my military heritage or lineage back through several generations that now we're in the next generation. And honestly, the third generation going into the global war on terror. But these are military kids who are growing up to join the military who understand the benefit of that connection. And then we'll be able to continue that connection with their own.

JOSIE: Oh, yeah, there's been some great research out there about the percentages of military kids who join. So we know that when we support the educational development of military kids, by getting books into the home or encouraging families to read together, we're positively impacting the future of the force. And you know, that's probably a little bit of an untapped topic on our side, but it's been really exciting to see work from our partner organizations like the National Military Family Association and Bloom Military Teens. They came out with a report at the end of last year that talked exactly about this. Some of the struggles that military teens have in particular and why it's important for us as a community to focus on military kids as a military readiness issue, not for today, but for tomorrow.

DUANE: No, I absolutely agree. And I love the work. I love reading number one, but I also love the work that United Through Reading is doing. If people wanted to find out more about UTR, how they could get to the app and things like that, how could they do that?

JOSIE: So our website www.unitedthroughreading.org has all the best information. If you want to go straight to download our app, you can visit utr.org/app. Or you can search for United Through Reading in the Apple, the Google Play Store. We are even on the Kindle, which is great for some families who use that Kindle Fire and like a kid-appropriate tablet device. You can just load all the stories on there. They can watch mom or dad whenever they want. So that's the best place to find us, but we are also all over social media. We would love to hear from folks what your favorite books to share. We're always looking for new ideas for books. And so that's one of the calls that we put out on social media from time to time, especially those families who've used United Through Reading who see the importance in reading or who are looking to start a reading routine, visit us at www.unitedthroughreading.org and we'll help you get started.

DUANE: That's great. I will make sure that all of those links are included in the show notes. Josie, it was great to be able to talk to you today.

JOSIE: It was great to chat with you. Thanks so much.

DUANE: Once again, we would like to thank this week's sponsor, PsychArmor. PsychArmor is the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military culture content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory that's free to individual learners as well as custom training options for organizations. And you can find more about PsychArmor at www.psycharmor.org. One of the points that I would like to reiterate is simply how great a program like United Through Reading is for all involved. As we mentioned in the episode, of course, the child gets a video of their parent reading a book, and the book itself is a great way to connect to parents separated by distance. But it's a welcome break from the realities of military life as Josie said. As a service member, when you're deployed or on temporary duty for an extended period of time, the job is and arguably should be 24 hours a day. The folks that you hang out with are the folks around you, the troops that you're with. One of the things that we don't often talk about is the extreme lack of privacy. On the majority of my deployments, even as a senior enlisted leader, my “room” was a large tent that I shared with at least six other people in my platoon. We built plywood three-quarter walls to designate some of the space, but it was still six dudes in a big tent. You eat together, you work out together, you do everything together. This is part of the extreme bond that forms with those who serve together, but can also be extremely tiresome. Sometimes you need a break. Like when you go in some small room shift from the always-on military mentality and make little bear and cow noises while reading a book for your kids. And nobody's going to give you crap for it if they hear it because they probably have kids at home too. It's a welcome respite from the pressures of deployment or temporary duty. In the same way, as Josie said again, in our conversation, it's a way for the non-deployed parent to engage with their service member in a non-military way. I think back to when I call home or connected with my wife while I was on deployment. How was your day or week? How was my day? As much as I can talk about. What do you need? What do I need? She doesn't want to tell me about the garbage disposal acting up. And I don't want to tell her about the soldiers who were acting up. We're trying to dance on the edge of normality and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I always thought the hardest thing for my wife was when I had to get off the phone abruptly because of something happening. I knew immediately whether I was safe or not, but she didn't. I was probably engaged in some problem-solving or emergency response. It was fully focused on what I was doing. But she had no idea of what was happening and no way to know. And so her imagination probably ran wild. I would always reconnect to reassure when I could, but it wasn't always possible for the stay-at-home parent to be able to have some peace of mind, some reminder that the person that they care for is not related to all that military chaos. But it's the parent that everyone knows that they want to be. That's an incredible gift that UTR can give to families.

The other point that I'd like to make is how important this mission is going forward. I know that I just talked about how beneficial UTR is during deployment experiences. But as Josie mentioned in this episode, this isn't just for combat deployments. Those who serve in the Navy and Marines are gone all the time. Ships will go to sea for 10 days to two weeks, every month in preparation for deployments. And extended deployments on ship can be six to nine months every year and a half or so. In the army, we call that preparation time going to the field and then deployments that are still happening to Europe, to Asia, to the Middle East and North Africa. Josie mentioned TDY several times. As I've mentioned before there wasn't a year between 2006 and 2013 that I wasn't gone for all or part of the year. There was one year that I was supposed to be home for a quote “reset” 2008. The unit that I was assigned to had returned to December of 2007. And scheduled for deployment in 2009. However, the army in its infinite wisdom decided that needed to send me on a four-month temporary duty. So the one summer I was going to have with my family, I spent in a hotel room in Delaware while my family stayed in Colorado. Josie also mentioned geo batching or being a geographical bachelor which is when the family lives in a different location than the service member, maybe it's temporary because you don't want to pull the kids out of their current semester and the family's going to be separated for three or four months until the end of the school year. Or it's a hardship assignment like Korea in which a service member is stationed overseas for a year on a non-combat assignment, but still separated. There can be hundreds of reasons why families would choose to live separately that have nothing to do with the strength of relationship. We anticipated, needing to do it at one point in my family, as I was going to take an assignment in order to return to Colorado, but wouldn't, you know, it, I deployed to Afghanistan instead. The point that I'm trying to make here in the middle of all this I, me, mine, military stories is that just because the military is no longer engaged in named conflicts doesn't mean that a core aspect of military life family separation has gone away. Supporting an organization like United Through Reading is just as important now as it was 15 years ago and will continue to be. So check them out, take advantage of their programs and support them if you can.

For this week, PsychArmor resource of the week, I'd like to share the PsychArmor course, 15 Things Military and Veteran Kids Want You To Know. Similar to PsychArmor’s cornerstone 15 things Service Members and Veterans Want You To Know. This short on-demand video brings the voices of military-connected youth to life and allows us to take important steps towards cultural humility when interacting with these resilient and amazing kids. If you're working with service members and Veterans, they likely have a family. And part of that family is young. Let's not forget about their unique needs when addressing the needs of those who are serving or have served. You can check it out by going to a link in the show notes.