Helping Military Kids Talk About War Stress At Home

A child doesn’t have the vocabulary for moral injury, PTSD, or hypervigilance, but they can feel a parent’s distance in their bones. When a service member or veteran comes home changed, kids often fill in the blank with the most painful explanation possible: “It must be my fault.” That’s where our conversation with licensed psychologist Dr. Pat Pernicano gets real, fast. She spent years at the South Texas VA working with veterans and co-developing Acceptance and Forgiveness Therapy, and she now focuses on how parental trauma ripples through children and family systems.

We talk attachment theory, deployment separation, and why “acting out” can be worry and grief in disguise. Dr. Pernicano explains how children internalize a caregiver’s emotional pain and how silence in the home can intensify shame and confusion. We also expand the lens beyond military families to first responders, medical providers, chaplains, and helpers carrying vicarious trauma, then bringing that stress back into everyday parenting.

At the center is her picture book, Little Butterfly And Her Daddy: Healing The Pain Of War, built to give families safe, age-appropriate language. A returning father whose wings don’t work becomes a powerful metaphor for a parent who can’t connect the way they used to, while a spider character “wraps up” worries so kids don’t carry them alone. We share ways the book can be used at home, in therapy, and in schools, plus discussion prompts that help kids open up without feeling pressured.

If you know a parent who’s struggling to talk, or a child who’s quietly carrying too much, listen, share this with someone who needs it, and subscribe and leave a review so more families can find these tools.

See all of her work at https://www.pernicanopathways.com

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Background

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, this is Dr. Danny Roberts, President and CEO of Moral Injury Support Network for Service Women Incorporated. Welcome to the Moral Injury Support Network podcast. Today we have a great guest with us today, Dr. Pat Pernicano. She is a licensed psychologist who worked at the South Texas VAMC, the Veterans Uh Medical Clinic from 2017 to 2025, and co-developed Acceptance and Forgiveness Therapy, a group program for veterans. In 2025, she co-authored Healing Veteran Moral Injury using metaphor and story to foster hope and connection and to help veterans share their stories and develop new nerves about self, others, and military experiences. She now returns to her earlier professional roots. She's focusing on the impact of parental trauma on children and families, whether through war, natural disaster, or other painful life events. Parents transmit emotional pain to their children. Veteran moral injury affects children and their development. To this end, she has self-published a picture book on Amazon to help children and families talk about emotional pain and move toward healing. She hopes to raise awareness of how parents' mental effect how parents' mental health affects children and impedes healthy development. Little Butterfly and her daddy, healing the pain of war is a gentle way of approaching a sensitive subject. Good day. How are you, Pat?

SPEAKER_00 1:31

I'm great. Thank you for having me. Um I my earlier career was with traumatized kids and families and family reunification. And one of the things we became really aware of is how parents, how their moods, their behavior, their actions, how it affects kids. So recently I started checking articles and publications about what is the impact on children of war, of deployments, and of parent, you know, PTSD, parent moral injury. And what do they know about how that can affect children's development? And so um this little book came out of that concern, right? That children need an opportunity to talk about their concerns.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Yeah, and I think that's great. We recently in May, uh, Gina, a partner of mine, friend of mine, and a colleague of mine, we did a continuing education event for licensed counselors on the effect of moral injury in families and different stressors on families. And Gina talked about the development of the brain um throughout childhood and the different different ways trauma affects the brain at different ages. So so I definitely uh understand that um it it does have a big impact, and often childhood trauma can show up much later in years or or become aware of it, right? It's sort of like in my own

How Parental Trauma Reaches Kids

SPEAKER_01 3:20

experiences. Um I went through a whole military career with a little bit of effects, but not really. I didn't I didn't I weren't aware of them as much after I retired from the army and started getting into some stressful situations I wasn't used to trying to run a business and make that work without you know a lot without having a lot of formal experience in business or formal training and so on. Some of the traumatic things that I had to deal with went back to childhood, right? And so um, and it surprised me because I thought, gosh, I'm in I'm 50 years old. So so so you know it it's like when they're young, they seem to they seem to maybe it doesn't affect them as much, but it's still there, and it it still can can show up much later, right? If it's not treated or dealt with.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Yeah, and and you make a good point. Um myself also, I something will happen even now, and I'm older than 50, right? Um, and then it'll trigger me right back to a memory, right? Of a of a childhood memory or a really core issue. You know, for children of service members, one of the difficult things is the separation during deployment, because kids um deal with that in different ways. And sometimes if they act out, they get labeled right as having a behavior problem.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

It's part of their worry about their parent um being in a war zone. Um there's also if you look at children in war zones, right? There's being more and more written about children in Africa, Israel, um Gaza, um, you know, Afghanistan, um, and now the Ukraine. Um, the children, not only are they traumatized by the war, but by parental loss sometimes, right? Or even um there's a problem with infrastructure that part of our security, right, is having a safe place to live. A safe place with our loved ones nurturing us. And that just gets all quote blown to hell, right? If you have war that has burned out your your neighborhood, your living area, and your security can be undermined um for a lifetime. Um I remember when I was young and and older, my parents had a habit of leaving without saying goodbye. And I remember where's mom and dad? They already left, babysitters here, right? They left. And then when my daughter was 10, we were visiting with my parents, and my parents left while we were both in the bathroom, and she came out crying, like, where's grand grandpa? I was like we went running after them. My my memory was aggravated. It's like, we're gonna catch them, we're gonna make them say goodbye. Well, veterans, uh, military members, if if they're injured overseas and if they're in a war zone, they can't even tell you where they are, right? And the children are home and they're reacting to the loss, they're reacting to however their their guardian or caregiver is acting, and too often families don't talk about it, so the children are carrying this, you would never know it. They all have it differently.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Yeah, I think of when I when I think about this paradigm and the difficulty of it, you know, I I go back to attachment theory, which I think is uh explains a lot for childhood things. And for those that don't know, but in in a nutshell, attachment theory says the stronger your bond with your parents as a child, the more supportive, loving, and caring they are, the more confident you become as a person, the more likely you you are to take risks and do like set big goals

Attachment Theory And Military Life

SPEAKER_01 8:00

because you know that you you can always come back to your parents and they'll soothe you, comfort you, give you helpful advice and so on. Whereas if if you don't have that strong bond or your parents are abusive or not trustworthy or whatever, you begin you you more likely to see the world as a fearful place, uh without safety, without, you know, um, and and so lower self-esteem, lower confidence, that affects a lot of things. So when you're when you're thinking about children of veteran parents, children of military parents or in a military family, um, you know, unless unless the parents are working really extra hard to try to help um fill that gap or help with that, you know, that's a natural uh sort of like challenge to to this strong attachment because of the being away, moving frequently, those kind of things.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Yeah, you know, attachment from the day you're born, really, it's about survival, um, it's about security, it's about comfort, it's about it's a secure place. So if you have a parent in the military during that attachment formation, you know, birth to three or four years old, um it can really threaten their sense of security, safety, deployments over, parent comes home. So for about 10 years I've been listening to veteran stories, right, of how they're changed and the moral injury and how they're changed and how they react differently to their family members, and they don't notice sometimes the changes in the elder children, you know. So the kids show you this little book, it's a very endearing little book about a character who she's a little girl, butterfly. Her daddy comes back from war and his wings don't work. Good metaphor for daddy is wrong, right? His wings are torn up, he can't fly with me. It's about the attachment between

The Little Butterfly Metaphor

SPEAKER_00 10:40

he says, kind of leave me alone, you know. Um, this is a grown-up problem.

unknown 10:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

She's like, Daddy, it's my problem too. And it is, it becomes a family problem, and if the parent is withdrawn feeling shame, uh depressed, traumatized, right, then to the child's eyes, really, the child says, My parent has changed. It could be a mommy, it could be a he, a she, a them. Right. Caregiver has changed.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Children, you know what we know, uh Dan, about child development is children internalize their parents' emotional pain. And guess what? They blame themselves. They they don't say what happened to daddy, they say, What did I do? Why doesn't my parents love me the same? Why can't my parent be with me right? And the child starts to get depressed. Uh research says they can internalize the mental health of their parent too. So the parents' guilt, grief, depression, loss can be internalized by the child, and children will react in different ways, you know, to that. And then if the parent says, be quiet, leave me alone, I don't want to talk about it. Um, in this little book, the daughter understands that her parent doesn't want to talk about it, but she knows that if he talked about it, he could get better. So it kind of encourages the the parent, the veteran, the military member to go talk to someone. Don't carry it, don't carry it alone. And it's done that uh is real approachable, like the characters in the book are real. Um I don't know, they're kind of sweet. And Bloomsbury Press worked with me to create the illustrations and the characters, and you know, this little you can't look at that without saying, oh poor little girl, right? Um and they go to visit see yes, it's a spider, and yes, she has peer and green hair. And what she does is they tell her their problems, and she wraps them up in spider silk and leaves them on her web. So they have to carry them home, and and kids get this. Um I tested the book on my grandsons, um, were visiting them, and I tested it because he's not a veteran, but he's a daddy who had a serious illness last year, and he was gone in the hospital for quite a while. And I know they worried about him, you know, and he came home, and um I read them the book, my husband and I read them the book, and they were just rapped, like, oh, they love the characters, the cuteness of them, but then halfway through the book, the four-year-old looked up and said, Grandpa, is the daddy gonna die? And we had not heard that, but in their world view, they had worried that their daddy was gonna die, right? You know, and and I think every child who hears the story will put it in their context, whatever it is they have worried about and not shared with their parent. It opens up a conversation, it opens up um a connection, it helps them talk about it because some families don't talk about the pain, they kind of bury it in.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Right. Well, they're they're they're sort of uh for a lot of people shame within the yeah, within themselves, within the household. A certain some some cultures, some cultural ideas are uh make make a create a barrier for for people to share for sure. Um is the was your primary approach that that that parents and kids would sit down and read this together, or is that how you envision how this how this works?

SPEAKER_00 15:36

I envision that a parent would read the book with a child, or an older child might pick it up and read it themselves, you know. Yeah, and then there's an there's an addendum at the end of the book that asks a set of questions, like discussion questions. So if a parent wants to have a discussion

Reading Together And Discussion Questions

SPEAKER_00 16:00

with the child, they can ask them one of those questions. Um like uh is there a time you worried about your mommy or daddy? Is there a time when you had something and need wanted to share it with someone, right? Um, I think one of the easiest questions is if you went to Samantha Spider to tell her problem, right? If you went to her, what would you tell her? What do you want her to wrap up for you? And kids will come up with their own whatever they're carrying inside, it's gonna come out. Right. You know, they're gonna share it. I also though envision that it could be read at a library, you know, they have those little book book groups. So you might have a caregiver and a child at a library and they're having book time. Um, some teachers have told teachers want to read it to their classrooms or a Sunday school classroom, they want to read it to the kids and have a discussion, right? So I think it could be used different different ways. A therapist certainly, a therapist would certainly read the book with a child and not only do some of the questions, but go into play. Because play therapy, that's a child's way of communicating. Right. Younger children have less words, they have more play. So instead of of suggested play activities to use with a younger child.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Yeah, that that makes sense. I could certainly see, like in a place, say Fayeville, North Carolina, where there are tons of veteran uh families or military families. Um, I I could see like a teacher using that or a school counselor, that kind of thing. Because I mean in the education system, we need we need better tools for for in North Carolina and maybe nationwide, we have purple star families, purple star schools that are they're military friendly, they meet a certain criteria, but I still think there there's a lack of tools that they're often able to provide teachers to identify even what might be happening with uh military kids, yeah uh due to deploy. And they don't always some deployments like everybody knows like the 82nd is deploying or something, but in at Fort Bragg, there's a lot of special operators, you know, they're not saying anything when they're deploying. So you may a teacher may think, well, there's not a lot of deployments happening, the kids are okay, but you don't really know. I mean, they could be children of uh special operators, there's always secret stuff happening, and a lot of military families have had deployments in the past, and that has some lingering sort of challenges and stressors, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Yeah, kids pick up on secrecy. You made a good point, you know, kids can tell if you're keeping a secret, and even if it's for their own good or it's because of military um guidelines, right, for special ops, right? The kids pick up on that level of intensity, some of the tension. Right. Um, I think a military school or counseling center, that'd be a

Schools And Simple Classroom Tools

SPEAKER_00 19:45

good place. Um years ago, I had a different story with little butterfly, but in this she still had Samantha Spider, who still wrapped up things, and there was a boy there, and I was thinking of how in a military classroom you could have an activity, and each child could put on a little piece of paper something they were carrying that they bothered them about their something about their family or their mom or and then you know put it on the paper or draw a picture of it. Some of them might be too young to really use words, and they don't have to tell everyone else, but then he wrapped it up. This young man, he was an abused kid who was living in a group home. He he turns out he wrote down something about his abuser, and then he wrapped it up and he used duct tape to make a cocoon, and he wrapped it and wrapped it and wrapped it and wrapped it, and then he stomped on it, and he goes, So there. And then he stuck it on a spider web and left it at the office. Yes. Um so kids in a classroom, I could even see kids making their own cocoons and having one of those Halloween webs on the wall, you know, and they could leave something behind, you know, and not take it home. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Yeah. I I think those are a lot of great ideas that I I think one of the difficulties, and that's what we're trying to do with with our organization too, is get more of this into the school systems. And uh that can be tricky. Schools are uh education systems already, and teachers are already so burdened with things to do, and um it can be a bit of a closed system in some ways, but I think getting more of these kind of like simple tools available for um in the school system for either counselors or teachers. That sort of thing, especially at the young younger level in your your elementary grades, there's a lot of story time and storytelling, and it's not as you get into middle school and high school, it's it's like much more crammed with educational standards that have to be met and so on. But if we could elementary even at the younger level, get them like get families being a little more functional in this way and more open, you'd prevent problems in the middle school and high school and later levels, I think.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Yeah, I think if you give them the roots, um the beginning, um, if you otherwise children draw faulty conclusions, um they can they can start to think like their parents are thinking, like that world is scary, right? Right. That you can't trust anyone, that you might have someone break into your house. I mean, if they they go to bed and they see dad going around the house or mom going around the house, locking all the windows, locking all the doors, checking the perimeter, you know, the kids start to feel like the world is not safe. They're inner world, you know, that security. And if a caregiver comes back and let's say they're really grouchy, they're really they get angry easily, then a child often thinks, oh, I'm walking on eggshells, I don't want to bother them, right? I don't want to upset them, and they can start to get um angry or sad or mad, you know, or worried, and those can last a long time if um if the service member or the veteran doesn't get help. Um, you know, it's not always the veteran. Um, I guess I I could make the point that whatever field your parent is in, it's pretty common in first responders, right? Right. That they are affected by trauma. Um, medical providers are affected by what they see, especially there's some research about COVID and the fact that people who worked during COVID uh felt

Trauma Beyond The Military Home

SPEAKER_00 24:35

helpless, um felt upset with themselves. They thought they should have been able to heal people or cure people. Right. And you know, there's there was a time when we didn't have enough gear, we didn't have enough over in the Ukraine, too. They didn't have enough medical equipment to do what they needed to do. Um they're they're finding too that clergy and chaplains they can carry a lot because they hear everybody else's story, and they are right few people that service members are comfortable going to because it's confidential, you know. Right. So they're they're carrying all this hidden pain and trying to just deal with it, push through it. So when they go home, they're they need some help with their families, you know, because they're dealing with a lot of grief.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

Therapists, we we have our own chair of vicarious, vicarious trauma.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

No, even researchers um can have that because when I when I start first started interviewing women veterans about their moral injury experiences, I was um blown away. I couldn't sleep, I was having some real difficulties. Um and what helped me is like to space out the uh the interviews where I I would only do one or two a week. Um and that would that would give me time to like sort of process what I was hearing and my own feelings and whatever. But yeah, so you know, any anyone who is you know hearing these stories or helping people or or in like these traumatic situations can can be affected, you know, um for sure, and then that sort of gets brought home, and it's definitely so and it's part part of the challenge is too, right? What I like about this book is that you know if your children are young, there's it's only I mean, there's a safety issue, you don't want to talk to them. There's some things you don't want to talk to them about, or at least there's a way to talk to them about it that doesn't, you know, when you're talking about woundedness and these kind of things, like you have to be careful with the language when they're when they're speaking to a a younger child. So a book like yours is designed to to

Gentle Language And Letting Kids Play

SPEAKER_01 27:20

give right parents and and kids language around these difficult, difficult concepts.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Yeah, you make a couple of really, really good points. Because I I relate to that when I was first working in trauma, um it can create some sleepless nights because you you do find yourself thinking about what they've been through, right? And for children, um when I worked with children that were abused and neglected, um, some of those stories will pop into my head, you know. I remember, but with kids, they they tend to get better more quickly if you give them the opportunity, right, to talk about it, to deal with it. Um something I mentioned in the book is you know, we don't talk to children about you know war trauma, it would scare them. It's right by TV some PG 13 guidelines, right? And you don't talk to the child about you know blowing up someone or dropping a drone bomb on someone, you just say something bad happened, right? And I had I I was in a a bad time, a bad place, something bad happened. It scared me. I you know, um, and you the child will say how they felt when you were gone, and so the focus isn't really on the adult, it's more on the child and whatever the child experienced, that absence, how the child experiences the changes in the caregiver. Because children are gonna open up their feelings if given a chance, or if you watch carefully, they play it out, they they the battle inside them, right? They're trying to conquer their own feelings of weakness when they my my grandson turns into a you know a mad dinosaur. When he's mad, he he becomes a terrible creature, right? Who goes around and tries to destroy other dinosaurs. It's it's their way of dealing with their feelings. Um, but I think the book is gentle, uh deliberately gentle, but suggestive, right? And and it doesn't guide or lead, it's suggestive that you know, uh, when I experience a change in my caregiver, right? I feel sad. In fact, the little butterfly in the book, she made a list. Someone told her if you write down the things that are on your mind, right, it can help. So why don't you make a list of the things before daddy went to war and now after? And what do you miss? And how is it different? And then share that with the caregiver, you know, and children will go, they'll make their list, they'll draw pictures. Look, mommy, look, daddy, look. And if the parent is, you know, listening carefully, they're gonna learn more about their child's inner world. Um, they'll be surprised. Like we we were surprised when my grandson, is the butter, is the daddy butterfly gonna die? How long do butterflies live, grandma? Do they, you know, is is is he gonna be okay? And it was like, he's okay, he's he's getting help, he's healing his wings, and then at the end of the story, he's flying again, and they're flying together. It's about the attachment, and they're happy together again. So that's the goal is to have the parent-child attachment strengthened, right? By by reading the book, by letting the child express him or herself.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Right. Well, that's great. So, where can they where can uh parents or teachers or um or therapists get the book?

SPEAKER_00 32:08

The best place right now is just to go to Amazon and to look up um you know little butterfly and her daddy, and it's gonna pop right up. I believe it's $12.95. And they I think Barnes

Where To Buy And How To Share

SPEAKER_00 32:30

and Noble has asked for this, it was pretty overwhelming. They want to put 10 books in each of their 753 stores across. I know, I know, yeah, so Bloomsbury is gonna get them printed, and the intention is that they'll have them for the holiday season, so like November, December, and if they sell those books, they're using it like a trial. So go to Barnes and Noble in November or December and get a book as a gift for someone else. There are friends of mine buying them and donating them to their public library, uh, to their school company. My brother was a school music teacher, he's donating them to the school librarian and the counselor. So just share them, and I think um people will be uh pleased at. I'm so thrilled and want to thank Bloomsbury for we we collaborated. Um, so I was able to describe what I wanted for illustrations, and I think you will find the characters are quite endearing. I I look at them and you you've seen the cover, Daniel. Yeah, um, it's like oh that feeling, and yeah, it it just does that to all of us because we need some stories that are sweet and have a happy ending. And right I want to say one thing. There's a few books out there. I don't want to, there's books about daddy went to war or whatever, but they're more intellectual, written to educate children about what happens in a deployment, what is a form, how does my daddy do his job, or my mommy, you know, what but it's a teaching form the books that are out there and how how I feel my daddy's a soldier, my mommy's a soldier, right? But this one is a relation, it is written to be interpersonal, it's written to be based on the relationship of the child and and a caregiver, and and a time when the caregiver is troubled and the child is picking up on that. And I I think it could be parents who have cancer could read this with their children. Um if you've had a loss in the family, you know. Um if you've had, you know, daddy comes home and mommy comes home and they lost a patient at the hospital, you know. Now in the the Ukrainian, um there's a colleague of mine, he's a chaplain, PhD. He goes to the Ukraine and does workshops with um service members, hospital workers, chaplains, families, and I've sent him the book to just take with him. And if there's an opportunity to read it with children, get a group of parents and kids together. Those kids really need some extra support.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, I think it's great what you're doing. I'm glad to hear that it's getting some traction and and is is getting distributed out there. And uh, we're happy to help with this podcast by uh explaining and and giving you a chance to. I think it's great that the work you're doing. We'll have uh links on our website and all that. But for those listeners who are listening, maybe in your car, whatever, um you know, you've got the information. You can Google it, you can find it on Amazon. And um, it's great having you with us, Pat, and love to have you in a few months and and give us an update

Final Takeaways And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 36:50

on how things are going. Uh, maybe after the after the holidays, and and you could tell me millions of copies have been sold, that would be great.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Yeah, I'm really thankful and grateful um that it's gonna be out there and available. Um, and uh it could become, you know, you say it invites more work because then I I'll have to keep them supplied. It's yeah, so um thank you.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

It's a nice problem to have though.

SPEAKER_00 37:21

Really appreciate you um picking this up and sharing my interest in this topic of the children.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

Yeah, I uh I think it's really important, you know, for many women veterans are single parents, and so this gives them a way to help talk about some things, and uh have in many of the women veterans I've worked with, they're with young kids, you know, they're struggling to talk to the kids, and and kids are having some like maybe acting out maybe at school and that kind of thing, but it's it's just trying to process, trying to sort out kids not even really understanding what's going on in their own mind necessarily. So this is just another tool that really helps parents, you know, and open thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:17

Open the door, right? Yeah, I think sometimes mommy veterans try to protect. I don't want to be stereotyped, but the moments want to maintain uh some peace for the kids, but in trying to protect, they can overprotect. Right. The daddy veterans avoid many of them just get busy, it's as they work sure they um they spend more time alone, and so this will bring people together.

SPEAKER_01 38:51

Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

Okay, I got a tool now, right? I got tools that'll open the door.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

Right. All right, Pat. Well, it's great again, great talking to you. And uh we'll uh we'll have this episode out here in a couple of days, and uh I hope we get uh millions of listeners um thanks getting this information, getting the book.

SPEAKER_00 39:14

So thanks, Danny.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Until next time. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 39:18

Welcome next time. Bye.