Sending off loved ones to the military is never easy but doing so with conflicts rising it is only natural to feel isolated and riddled with anxiety of what is to come. Finding a community is important and even as the app garners a bad reputation for its algorithm and a predominant use amongst older generations, it retains one of its early selling points: connecting people with a broader community.
The communities created on Facebook groups do supply a supportive community for active duty families and those who have just sent their children to boot camp.
Each group has a variety of things from prayer, words of encouragement, and questions with some answers as to protocols, with support groups in areas all across the country, these groups foster a lively community that seems to help many not feel so alone.
Lonnie and Carrie Blevins, parents to two service members, noted that even in boot camp family members of certain units have gone about making groups.
“When they go into boot camp there’s separate groups for each unit that they go into. So all the parents are you know they talk to each other on there.” noted Carrie Blevins.
Lonnie Blevins added, “Yeah, so if any of the parents find out any information about what’s going on with their same battalion, they put it on the on the Facebook page and you can actually keep up with everything that they’re doing.”
The two noted that this offered a level of comfort to family and partners that were both concerned for their service member and also for themselves as having a community understanding of their own experience allowed for a lightened weight.
With her daughter in reserves after her six year enrollment time, Janet Jones hadn’t been a part of a group for a while only recently rejoining following her daughter’s deployment. A daughter of a service member as well, Jones has been a military mom for the past 23 years and understands the need for community in times of both deployment and boot camp.
“I sort of know from my whole life experience, about the need for military families to support each other and they always have it’s a tight knit community of people. But, if you’re not if you’re not in a community where — because for many mothers their children have been sent away to basic training far far away from where they are then they get sent off to a duty station also far far away from where they are and and they’re not often located near a base or where there are other military families and then they don’t have that support system that you would if you had that community right there with you so I think it’s important that we can have this online group of people,” said Jones
Community at the tip of your fingers, support and others who understand exactly what it is you are experiencing that is what these online groups offer. For mother, father, spouses, children, and even friends of service members these communities lighten the load, providing understanding some cannot find close to home.
For families less seasoned in the military life it offers answers from others who’ve gone through this process before making an experience that is all together terrifying, a little less unknown.
Of course it is important to practice online safety even in groups like this, but a lot of these groups are private or the public ones contain a large amount of monitoring by admin. Even then remember to follow the normal rules you would when using the internet do not give sensitive information, such as location.
If you want anonymity a lot of these groups will allow you to post anonymously and you can find that support without feeling exposed.
