Families: research into the impact on service families of ‘weekending’

March 14, 2019

The Naval Families Federation (NFF) recently published research examining the lifestyle of Royal Navy and Royal Marines families. This research, carried out by the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, offers an invaluable window into the implications of geographically dispersed families and ‘weekending’, where the serving person lives away from home during the week. The vast majority of Royal Navy and Royal Marines families live this way, as do many in the Army and RAF. Furthermore, this trend is likely to be increasingly reflected across all three services in the future.

Read the full findings of the research: The effect of non-operational family separations on family functioning and well-being among Royal Navy/Royal Marines families.

One immediate result of this project is the production of an NFF resource for parents and carers, ‘A Guide for Parents and Adults Supporting Children and Young People’, which was created by the NFF to offer strategies and encouragement for families affected by all forms of separation and those who support them. One finding of the research was that there is a general lack of appreciation that shorter separations still have a significant impact, the guide is in part designed to help address that.