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The Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University researches military families for military families. Founded in 2000 by the Office of military Community and the Family Policy in the Dept of Defense. In 2007 MFRI received funding from a Lilliy Endowment grant, the organizations has grown to include the "development and delivery of outreach activities for the military" they also work with civilian organizations that support military families. The MFRI is guided by the belief that researchers and practitioners should work in together to improve outcomes. The web site is primarily directed towards military leadership and civilian professionals who work with military personnel and of course to the military personnel themselves. There are resources available on the site but the raw research data is not presented. A great deal of resource is spent on how families cope with extended and or repeated deployments that separate families for extended time periods. Credibility is aided by the easily recognizable and highly respected partners and grant providers such as the Lilly Endowment, the Dept. of Defense, Zero To Three and the Sesame Workshop. There seems to be no built in bias other than that of being military centric which is plainly stated and there are no advertisements found on the site other than those that support their mission statement. I learned that whatever problems civilians have with work-family, military personnel have those same issues and added to that they must find ways to cope with being away from their children for extended time periods. Worse yet is the idea that being a single parent is not an justification for not being deployed so in the worst case you may have your children looked after by strangers for up to six months at a time, at which time you may have only two weeks leave to spend with your children before being shipped out again. One can only imagine the types of recurrent support that would be required over a career.

Terry - It is definately a priority in my family to support the military and their families. I really enjoyed your review and this site. This site provides a huge number of resources for military service persons and their family and that is the focus of the site. There is a tiny fund raising spot, way down at the bottom of the main page, where you can donate funds. This says alot about the site, they are interested in helping those in need and provide lots of resource links. Supported by Purdue University gives it a lot of presence and hopefully funding for the programs.

I think that's a great asset for many military families as they struggle with the challenge of deployments. It's difficult enough to pay bills and raise a family but with one spouse having to serve remotely for an extended period of time they take on many more issues than the average family. I hope that our government continues to support families with this need to ensure those that do deploy are comfortable that their family is being assisted.