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Parents folded into family readiness efforts

Many parents of junior Marines know little about the Corps and how it operates — and now there’s a campaign underway to bring them into the loop.

It’s part of a 2008 expansion of the Family Readiness Program, which is slated to get an infusion of money, staff and additional services. Its annual budget of $5 million will ramp up to $30 million this fiscal year.

For years, the Family Readiness Program focused on spouses and Marines’ children. But the program is responding to a growing number of Marines who see their parents as a vital part of their day-to-day lives.

“When I got in, I wanted to get away from my parents,” said Sgt. Maj. Kevin Wilson of the Personal and Family Readiness Division, a Chicago native who enlisted in 1979. “Today, it’s not the same thing. These kids are connected to their parents, and they want to stay connected to their parents.”

Next year, Marines will be able to add their parents to an emergency contact list, which was previously mostly limited to spouses. That will coincide with a new communications network that will send out instant e-mails, text messages and voice mails providing information to families.

For years, that information was spread through a viral phone network that predated the Internet age, in which spouses would get a phone call and then call an assigned list of other spouses to relay news about the unit.

The Family Readiness Program also will begin offering parents a version of the Lifestyle, Insight, Networking, Knowledge and Skills Program, or LINKS. The program, previously aimed at spouses, provides a broad over view of life in the Marine Corps — from an explanation of rank structure and commonly used slang terms, to the array of programs and benefits available to Marines and their families.

The parent-oriented LINKS instruction programs will be offered in-person on Marine bases for families to access when visiting their children. An online course soon will be available for Marine parents who cannot travel.

Even basic elements of military life are unfamiliar to some parents who have no previous exposure to it, said Kim Gates, the program section head of the Marine Corps Family Team Building Program.

Gates recently met a woman who was confounded by the mail she received from her son while he was in Iraq. The mother didn’t understand why her son’s address included so many numbers, identifying his unit, and why it was stamped domestically as part of the military overseas mail system.

“She said, ‘I think he’s lying to me — he says he’s in Iraq, but his mail is coming from San Francisco,’” Gates recalled.

The outreach effort to parents comes as the Family Readiness Program expands. It will include an additional 84 civilians to serve as Family Readiness Officers at the regimental and group levels and higher. On the battalion and squad levels, uniformed staff noncommissioned officers for the first time will get FRO duties as their primary duty assignment. Those NCOs will not deploy, but will stay home as part of the rear detachment, where they can better work with Marine families.

The stepped-up staff of FROs will work alongside Key Volunteers, who have done much of the family related work in recent years.

Officials also see the parent outreach as a way to retain the best junior Marines.

“Parents need to be aware that their sons and daughters are taken care of,” Gates said.

That may be critical when it comes time for the first-term Marines to think about re-enlisting.

“Today’s generation will talk it out with their parents,” Wilson said. “If the parents perceive you have a good quality of life, they are going to talk to you about staying in.”