Promoting Health with Kids
The military lifestyle can be hard on kids, especially when part of their support system is away. Maintaining good physical and mental health is so important. Let’s examine the factors for good health and some things for you to do to set your military-connected child up for life.
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Special Guest
Maryse Neilson is Health Promotion Manager at CFB Esquimalt and a member of the MARPAC Health and Wellness Strategy.
Highlights
- The different kinds of health to consider.
- 5:11 The factors for good health.
- Easier to establish good behaviours when a child is young.
- Recommendations to military families.
- If you start early, what does it look like?
- Be creative. Shop together, clean together, garden together.
- 18:36 Try to promote spontaneous play.
- Promoting good mental health habits.
- 23:03 All behaviour is communication.
Quotes
“At a family level, we have to create family patterns and behaviours and structures that promote our health.”
– Maryse Neilson
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Links
Thank you
- This podcast is made possible by funding from True Patriot Love Foundation.
- Thank you to Organized Sound Productions for their help bringing this podcast to life.
Transcript by Otter.ai
Intro
This podcast is made possible by funding from True Patriot Love Foundation.
Maryse
We all know what we have to do to eat properly. We all know what enough sleep looks like we could all probably cite the stats or tell you how many fruits or vegetables we have to eat a day or you know that we need to be physically active. But the reality is, is that very few of us actually do it. So we have to create systems and structures and that’s at a societal level, but it’s at a family level to we have to create family patterns and behaviours and structures that promote our health.
Intro
The military lifestyle is all encompassing. It’s difficult, but rewarding. Dynamic, very, very dynamic. Unpredictable. You are in the Canadian Armed Forces, or a family member connected to the military. You know, the lifestyle can be a challenge. The military lifestyle is always changing. In this podcast, we explore the world of deployment, postings and transitions. This is The Military Lifestyle. Here’s your host, Jon Chabun.
Jon
The military lifestyle can be hard on kids, especially when part of their support system is away. Maintaining good physical and mental health is so vital, so important. Maryse Nielsen is Health Promotion Manager at CFB Esquimalt and joins me to talk about the factors for good health and some things for you to do to set your kid up for life.
So today, I’m talking with Maryse Nielsen, health promotion manager. Is that correct?
Maryse
That’s right.
Jon
The title.
Maryse
Yeah.
Jon
So welcome today.
Maryse
Thank you.
Jon
We’re gonna be talking promoting health with kids. Tell me what are the different types or kinds of health?
Maryse
Well, health is a huge topic obviously. But you know, the ones that we really kind of look at our physical health. So that would include our sort of physical literacy. So how capable we are to do different, you know, developmentally appropriate movements as our body. Our nutrition intake. And how we feed our bodies or nourish our bodies so that we can optimize their health. And then obviously, a really important one with kids and adults is our mental health. How do we encourage resiliency? How do we help kids develop the language we’re using right now is mental fitness. So just like we have our physical fitness and we think about, you know, how we how we have to sort of really work at and engage our physical fitness on a regular basis if we expect to stay physically fit. We need to do the same thing with our mental health, right? We need to practice mental fitness on a regular basis, and do things that promote our mental health.
Jon
And when you mentioned physical stuff, I think of things like like diet, sleep, getting exercise.
Maryse
Yeah, sleep is huge piece with kids and adults for sure. Active living, right, how much activity do we need each day? You know, and how do we do that in an environment, especially these days where it’s getting more and more challenging to be physically active. A lot of kids don’t walk to school anymore for lots of complex reasons. It’s harder and harder for kids to just sort of play independently outside. Our neighborhoods just aren’t as designed as well to promote active living. And our structures in society aren’t so even if we have our kids, you know, active in all sorts of sporting activities and things like that. We’re kind of just losing more and more of that capacity for kids to just play, play independently. And when I was growing up, you just we just left the house and kind of played outside most of the day. We just don’t, I have kids myself, and we just don’t do that anymore.
Jon
I remember when I was a child, I would walk to school, and I was elementary school age, you know, and, yeah, we didn’t, we didn’t go with any adults or anything.
Maryse
No no, I yeah.
Jon
Yeah, that’s going as a kid. Yeah. Back in the day, I guess those days have passed. And with the mental side or the mental health side, what are what are some things like is that just like, the ability to bounce back to adversity is that?
Maryse
Yeah that and even, you know, we think about those are sort of hallmark traits of resiliency, right? Which is getting lots of attention these days, because we know that childhood anxiety is on the rise. Childhood anxiety and depression and that, again, there’s lots of complex reasons for that. It’s not, it’s not a simple kind of thing to unwrap right or unpack. But yeah, how do we help kids become more resilient, but also how do we help kids express a wide range of emotions and feel okay about that. How do we as adults, manage our kids multiple, you know, emotions and feelings and how do we how do we teach ourselves and our children how to self soothe in the face of increasing anxiety, right, all the important things that we know, help us learn to cope with more and more adversity.
Jon
So, what are the factors for good health?
Maryse
Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s a huge question. Well, you know, we’re talking about how do we support our kids to be healthy, as healthy as they can be? Right. The work that that we do in health promotion is we look at how do we rather than kind of create this recipe for individual health we look at how do we create you know, healthy communities. So it’s a really a public health model. And if we look at at that, as families raising our children, you know, there’s sort of five things that we want to think about in a health promotion or public health model we look at helping develop individual skills. Things like following the Canada Food Guide, making sure that you get enough vegetable and fruit intake, making sure that you are limiting, you know, sugary and like non-nutritional kind of foods as much as possible, and really keeping those as treats, making sure that you are getting the right amount of sleep. So educating ourselves and our kids as to what makes optimum health. You mentioned sleep already. So kids need anywhere from sort of 10 to 12 hours of sleep a night, most kids, they also need to be getting at least an hour of active living every single day. So no breaks for kids every single day that can, that can be broken down into sort of, you know, 10 or 15 minute chunks of time. And it doesn’t mean they have to be running for an hour or playing soccer for an hour. But they need to be moving their bodies. You know, they need also to be having a number of different opportunities to practice new, physically developmentally appropriate skills, learning how to throw a ball, learning how to catch a ball, learning how to run, learning how to kick their legs a certain way, learning how to balance, developing core strength, all those sorts of things. Those are of course for children who are able bodied and, and kids with physical limitations or disabilities would have different developmental stages to to reach. So we teach individual skills, but then it doesn’t matter how many individual skills you have, if your environment isn’t supportive, then we need an environment that promotes health. So that might look like having lots of healthy foods in your fridge, having pre cut fresh fruits and vegetables ready to go so that your kids can snack on those things, that might look like creating an environment at home where we only take the car, if it’s more than a mile away, otherwise, we walk or ride our bikes, it might look like we limit screentime because we know that screentime and, you know can interrupt sleep for kids. It can also increase anxiety, for lots of again, complex reasons. And so there’s we want to create an environment that promotes health and makes health the easiest option. The third thing we want to do that we do at sort of public health level is when we think about how do we create healthy public policy. So how do we make sure that we have these optimal goals in mind? And so as a family, you can think about, you know, what are our sort of policy statements right for health. So we’re going to all be active on the weekend together. You know, every weekend, we’re going to do a different hike. Every weekend, we’re going to go for a bike ride, you know, every weekend, we’re going to make a healthy meal together, or each kid depending on their age, it’s going to take a different night and make a healthy meal. We’re going to prioritize family time together. And we’re going to say that there are certain rules around screentime. Right or phone time. And so those those rules, family rules are an important sort of way of setting up success. And the fourth thing we do from a from a health promotion perspective is we mobilize community action or we strengthen community action. So that’s, you know, it’s great if we as parents are helping our kids develop all this all of this capacity to be healthy, but it’s even more awesome when they develop that interest and commitment themselves. It’s how do we transfer those kind of external values and make them internal for our kids. And that takes time. And it takes experience and it takes, you know, having fun doing healthy things. And it you know, and it becomes sort of habit and rewarding right for them. And then the last thing we do from a health promotion perspective, as we move our resources, from sort of, you know, if you think about health in a public health sense, right, we spend a ton of money on people who are sick. So in a health promotion model, we would spend more of that money preventing illness. From a family perspective, you could sort of think about, you know, we’re going to spend some of the money that we would have spent on a new gaming system. Instead, we’re going to buy bikes this year, or we’re going to spend the money that we would have spent going to, I don’t know on a trip, maybe we’ll invest that in creating a really cool backyard with badminton nets and volleyball nets and things like that, right. So it’s about kind of moving some of the resources you would spend as a family from into things that promote health things that make healthy living easier. Whenever healthier, the healthier choices, the easier choice, we’re going to win. And so that’s, that’s what we want to do from a health promotion perspective, even with our kids is just make sure that healthy choices are easy and quick and rewarding and available.
Jon
The military lifestyle, do you find that it contributes to more health-related issues in children than civilians? Do you see that?
Maryse
I don’t work specifically with military kids. So I can’t say that with any legitimacy.
Jon
I’ve seen research done.
Maryse
Yeah, for sure.
Jon
From the United States where they would talk about the mental and behavioural issues.
Maryse
Absolutely.
Jon
Stress disorders. Higher rates than civilian populations.
Maryse
Sure. Absolutely. So when you think about the added demands of military life, right and the added stress in particular on families, when members are deployed, when communication is difficult, when members are in scary places, and all of that sort of can lead to just just less stability for children. I think there’s an opportunity there for kids to develop really important resilience skills. But yeah, for sure, we need to think about how does mom or dad being away for a prolonged period of time impact a kid and how do we support that child and so those mental health supports or the mental health promotion piece in that regard would be super important, right. And I know there’s great resources available, you know, on, on pre deployment, support workshops, and also just support groups even for children to meet while their parents are deployed or while a parent is deployed, to just normalize that right when we know that other people are going through the same thing we’re going through, it makes it just makes it easier to understand, easier to, to work through and and we can share that experience with other people.
Jon
Establishing healthy behaviors. Definitely easier to do that in childhood rather than change.
Maryse
Absolutely, yeah.
Jon
Unhealthy behaviours when you’re an adult.
Maryse
Yeah, yeah, there’s I mean, there’s no doubt about it. And the data is concerning when we look at things like, if we don’t kind of we talked about it like it’s a bit of a blueprint, right. So under six, in particular, if kids do not have that blueprint for active living, that blueprint for healthy eating, you know, for self soothing, to get to sleep, all of that sort of stuff, those healthy habits that promote longevity and health, it’s really hard to catch up. A child who’s never been physically active is unlikely to start being physically active as a teenager or an adult if they’ve never had access to that in childhood. And same with weight. And having a high weight or being overweight is not in and of itself, necessarily a health issue. If you’re very if you’re active and you have all sorts of other healthy attributes, but being really overweight as a child, it makes it really difficult to ever be a healthy weight as an adult, right. So we want to teach those things as early on as possible, and really just help our kids develop those healthy habits and healthy relationships with food and activity and, and to like I said, enjoy them. Kids have to have fun while they’re doing it. We all do. I mean, even adults, it’s no, you know, it’s the other thing I just really want to say is that, you know, the important thing to remember about health is that this is we all know what we have to do to eat properly. We all know what enough sleep looks like we you know, we could all probably cite the stats or tell you how many fruits or vegetables we have a day or what, you know that we need to be physically active. But the reality is, is that very few of us actually do it. So individual behaviour shaming is not helpful. It’s much more complicated than just sort of saying, hey, if you know what you have to do, you’ll do it. The reality is, is even with all of that information, very few of us actually do the things we need to do to stay healthy and optimize our health. So we have to create systems structures and that that’s at a societal level, but it’s at a family level too, right? We have to create family patterns and behaviours and structures that promote our health.
Jon
Yeah, that’s definitely a good idea. Is there anything else you’d recommend to do to military families? If you start early, what does that look like?
Maryse
Yeah, so starting early might look like, instead of having a TV on while you’re making dinner with your kids, getting them involved or having you know, if you’re going to have a book by tape or something, right, put it put a book in on a CD or find a book online and have have it read out. You could also have your kids help in creating dinner looking at how do you how do you prepare a healthy dinner. From a mental health perspective, it’s talking about it’s normalizing a wide range of feelings and behaviours. When we look at children who are upset and crying and having a difficult time with maybe some grief and loss rather than making them feel immediately better about that because it’s uncomfortable for you, letting them sit with that and showing them that you’re comfortable with that and that you don’t have to go anywhere, you know that you can just be with them and support them through that. So there’s so many things we can do early on, that help our kids understand what healthy looks like, and healthy from a from an emotional perspective, healthy from a physical perspective, from a sleep perspective, spiritual perspective, all of those things, I think that we you have to make it fun. You have to make it easy. If you want to promote bike riding with your family, then keep your bike somewhere where the kids can easily get them, make sure they’re tuned up. Make sure you have helmets that fit, make sure that you have taught road safety so that kids understand right and and you can do there’s so many trails in Victoria, you can do those those bike rides together as a family. I think sometimes it can. It can be tough for families, you know, we’re we most of us work. We’re working at home if we’re not working outside of the home, if we have a partner who’s or we’re a single parent family, then yeah, kind of pulling everything together to go for a bike ride on the weekend probably feels like a huge extra challenge. So maybe you just go for a walk to the grocery store. Or maybe just turn off the screens and play outside for half an hour.
Jon
And you mentioned cooking together as a great idea. Even something as simple as shopping together.
Maryse
Shopping together, cleaning the house together, like you know, you think about it, you’re moving, bending gardening together, like all of those things are teaching.
Jon
I can teach my kid to weed? That can be fun? Oh, my gosh.
Maryse
Yeah, absolutely you can. And you think about the physical skills they gain from you know, like, if you’ve ever weeded for three or four hours, you know how it feels the next day, right? And kids they gain core strength they they’re satisfied by pulling the weeds out. It’s yeah, there’s so many, get creative. But keep your kids active, keep them off the TV and internet and every day. There’s new guidelines coming out, right, but the ones that really I think important ones to remember are no screens before the age of two. Okay? The pediatric association of Canada has said there’s nothing of value that comes from putting a kid in front of a screen under the age of two. That in fact it you know, there’s all sorts of things that that negative things that can happen when you do that, any other kid don’t over rely on screens. So, so keep your screentime to sort of half an hour a day. And that’s tough to do. So if you have a TV in your in your family room or in your kitchen, turn the thing off or get it out of there. So screentime is a big one, physical activity …
Jon
Do you find gaming?
Maryse
Gaming is increasingly challenging as sort of the the grade three probably and up crowd. I find in my own family, the things that we have done that have worked really well are we don’t have any screens upstairs. So what that means is, that’s where our, our the way that our house is structured is our kitchen and family room are all upstairs. So we have a TV room downstairs, but it’s not the focal point of our day to day activity. So we have to go downstairs to watch TV, that really limits the amount of time that screens are on, right? We don’t have gaming consoles in our house, but lots of people do. So you have to figure out how are we going to limit the accessibility and the time spent on one of these. Or, you know, just iPads for kids now, right, and phones and all of that stuff. That’s a whole we could spend a whole other podcast just talking about that right. But I think you know, the, the big ones to remember that I would suggest are limiting screen time, an hour of physical activity every day, try to promote spontaneous play. So meaning, you know, lots of playdates lots of non-adult interfering opportunities for kids to get down and dirty and learn from one another. Think about how many sports teams and things that we that our kids are now involved in, that have constant rules and adults managing them and when kids don’t have the time or the freedom to explore some of those social rules themselves, they never really learned how to negotiate social situations when adults aren’t around. So we want to give them those opportunities to do that. We want to give them the chance to learn how to argue with their friends, to learn how to take turns, to learn how to manage conflict, right, those are all important developmental skills, and they’re all part of being a healthy adult. In terms of nutrition and food intake, put lots of healthy things in front of them, but let them decide what they put in their body. You want to create, help them create a healthy relationship with food and so over managing what they actually eat is a slippery slope. You want to be careful about that. And then water and sleep rather than like just drink water. That’s our thing. Drink water you don’t need juice, you don’t need certainly don’t need pop. And you don’t need power drinks that’s for sure as a kid and so just water and lots of sleep.
Jon
All you need to do is see the, it’s not a scientific study, it’s just feed cake to young children at a birthday party and see what happens to them.
Maryse
Yeah, totally.
Jon
They usually try to do it at the end of a birthday party.
Maryse
Always. Yeah.
Jon
Kids are starting getting hopped up and then it is like time to go. Yeah.
Maryse
But you know, I also think that kids, like it’s being a child should be magical and fun, and we should have, like, we don’t want to demonize or villify any food, right? So cake is, of course, something that you should all enjoy on occasion, and having a special drink on a special dinner, you know, or at a party. That’s also a great thing to do. But when are you know, when we’re primarily eating sugar and refined sugar and not really thinking about, you know, these things as treats then it becomes challenging.
Jon
Yeah, definitely. When it comes to mental health. What are some things to do to promote that? I mean, we we talked about a lot about the physical side, but …
Maryse
Yeah, so the mental health side is so important for kids. Like I said earlier, you know, we are seeing definitely much higher rates of anxiety in kids as young as 8, 7-8 years of age, right, and we know from, you know that we’re having a real explosion of anxiety when kids go to university. It’s not just imagined, it’s real. There’s complex reasons that I that we can’t get into necessarily now for why that is. But some of the ways that you can support positive mental health in your child is by again, setting up structures that promote that. So physical activity and mental health go hand in hand. Also the ability to talk openly and honestly, but how you’re feeling and to not, it’s not your problem to solve those feelings, but just to give, you know, to listen to them and to normalize them, so you know, yeah, it’s okay to feel sad about something that’s sad. In fact, it’s healthy, getting more comfortable as adults with a whole host of feelings. You know, and sometimes we aren’t comfortable with those feelings ourselves when we have them. We don’t want our kids to hurt and so we tried it. Take that pain away. But it’s really an important thing to learn how to sit with your feelings of discomfort, and recognize that they don’t have to become the definitive way that you feel that they will pass and that you can learn to cope. And that feeling sad is not the end of the world. Now, if your child is starting to exhibit symptoms of sadness all the time, then that’s a problem. You’d want to find out what that’s about. But, but from a health promotion perspective, lots of sleep, lots of physical activity, healthy foods, and also just healthy expression of feelings. Talking openly and honestly, sharing your own experiences of what it was like to be a kid and how you can remember feeling that way can go a really long way just to sort of helping kids understand and negotiate and manage all of this conflict that they’re experiencing.
Jon
And if you have a very small child, when they’re very small, sometimes they can’t express themselves as much, trying to build that totally literacy, trying to build that way to express how they’re feeling, definitely a challenge.
Maryse
So one thing to remember is that all behaviour is communication. So when we can look at behaviour and not get upset about it, but rather try to understand what a child is trying to communicate to us with behaviour, then all of a sudden it becomes an opportunity to have a conversation or if they’re if they’re not able to talk at this point, then to give them comfort, right or to you know, they’re trying to tell you something that’s going on for them. So yeah, if you don’t have language yet, right, how do you support mental health? Well, you lots of ways lots of touch, lots of cuddle. Lots of reading, lots of talking.
Jon
Reading is actually a huge piece.
Maryse
Yeah, huge piece. Yeah. There’s so many studies out on the impact of reading to your child right well into their teen years, when they’re a teenager may not want to cuddle with you while you’re reading to them but little kids will, and so yeah, having them sit on your lap and read it every night creating a tradition of doing that. You know, that’s very powerful time together. You know, I think how you promote mental health in children is that you, you give, you’re present with them, you give lots of time and energy and experiences to them. Really important, especially when they’re maybe not behaving exactly the way you would like them to, or they are struggling with their emotions is that you sit with them, you show them I’m okay, I’m comfortable with with sadness, it doesn’t, you know, I can ride this out with you. And then you’re going to teach them when they’re watching you ride it out. They’re learning how to do that themselves. The other thing you know, is we want our kids to know that it’s okay to fail, whatever that whatever that means. That success is not is not always winning. It’s not always at being the best. But a really important part of resiliency is learning that it’s the effort that matters, right? It’s the you know, the intention and the effort. It’s not necessarily the result. That’s important, right? So how what did you learn from this experience can be much more important than whatever you received because of it. But our kids are we live in a really kind of a world that rewards achievement and success in a very narrowly defined way. And I think we have to be really careful about buying into that too much. And, and so sometimes kids who do extremely well, because they’ve had all sorts of supports, and, you know, have never really experienced failure when they go to university and they’re not getting straight A’s and they recognize oh, my gosh, it’s so much harder. You know, when I don’t have my parents here to do all these things for me, they really do you struggle. So yeah, promoting independence, promoting all of those important skills, right, that go with independence, starting that at an age appropriate level and not over functioning for your kids. All of those things are important to promoting good mental health.
Jon
The lifestyle will definitely contribute stressors.
Maryse
Absolutely.
Jon
But it’s all about how you face them. What do you do when the support structure is away? One thing might be I think you obviously modeling, adult modeling, but if you only have maybe one adult in the mix.
Maryse
Yeah, very stressful, very challenging. If you are feeling isolated and you and you literally are isolated. How do you how do you change that? Right? And I think it’s really important to reach out to join networks when you can to in anticipation of a deployment or something like that to really, if you’re not already connected to other partners on that, you know, his partners will be away on that deployment. Do that. I know you’ve got lots of to the MFRC you guys have lots of opportunities to do that through your ship networks and things like family support and things like that. You know, one of the realities of being a military family is you do you have there’s extra work required in terms of getting that support, you don’t you don’t have your families around all the time. Even if you’re regularly posted and you don’t have those those professional networks either that you can rely on. You’ve got to make some connections wherever you can. And don’t be afraid to ask for help. Because, you know, none of us can do this work alone, we have to support one another. And so I think really, you know, reaching out to to the MFRC, reaching out, there’s, there’s lots and lots of resources available, but you got to go and find them.
Jon
Is there anything else you’d mention?
Maryse
I think, you know, the really important thing with promoting health is that we can very quickly become overwhelmed with all of the data and all of the ways that we can, you know, how do you measure health what’s most important in children and adults is that we have good mental health meaning that we are feeling sort of like we use the the language of living in the green, right, so the the green meaning good to go. It doesn’t mean by the way that you’re constantly happy and perpetually optimistic. It just means you can cope and function and you’re generally feeling pretty good. Pay attention to the behaviours that we know, tell us, you know, can indicate that there’s a problem with our mental health. Okay, so pay attention to them in yourself, know what to look for, in terms of what the what those signs are in kids. And they’re the same, by the way, right? They’re the same with the exception, obviously, of the gaming, gambling and substance use, right. Obviously, we wouldn’t be looking at about, hopefully it’s in certainly small children. But yeah, we want to pay attention to all of those things, but we want to keep it fun. Health needs to be seen as a resource for everyday living not as this kind of strict, hard to achieve kind of optimum way of living in this world, right.
Jon
It shouldn’t be a pain.
Maryse
It should not be painful. It should not be difficult. It should just be our most of the time, we’re feeling pretty good. And we’re paying attention to what we put in our bodies, how we move them, what we do, right how we spend our time, and to really kind of create an environment that supports that as much as possible. It’s kind of like, you know, if you go to the store and you buy tons of crappy food, and you bring it home and then you and then you feel badly because you ate it, well, of course, you know, that’s not creating a supportive environment. If we have lots of junk food lying around, we’ll eat it. Yeah. And so just, you know, that’s a really simple example of creating an environment.
Jon
What I do is I’ll buy lots of fruit.
Maryse
Yes.
Jon
And I’ll bring it to work and then I’m forced.
Maryse
Exactly.
Jon
What I’m gonna eat? Yeah, I’m gonna eat fruit.
Maryse
And make it fun for kids. Right? Like there’s no reason why and adults too by the way, we are way more likely to pick up a cut piece of fruit or vegetable then we will the whole fruit or vegetable, right? Nobody’s gonna walk over to a unpeeled carrot and start chomping away on it, right, well, maybe one or two people will but most people won’t but if those carrots are cut up with some nice you know, healthy dip and or hummus and, and a bunch of other vegetables and then it looks attractive, we’ll eat them. That’s also about doing the things that we know people will respond to, and kids are the same way if you make it fun they’ll eat it.
Jon
Well, thank you very much for your time. That was great.
Maryse
You are very welcome.
Jon
If you’re interested in learning more about Health Promotion, you can visit their website, CAFconnection.ca. Before I leave, I just want to thank you for listening to the first season of The Military Lifestyle. It’s our first year. So yeah, thank you to everyone that took time to send us feedback. Some very, very cool comments. If you have any ideas for future topics, or have any questions, comments, feel free to send them via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email us at communications@esquimaltmfrc.com. We are planning on future episodes, so you can look for those later this year.
Extro
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Military Lifestyle. To learn more about this episode and to check out our other resources like the Deployment App, go to Esquimaltmfrc.com. A special thanks to True Patriot Love Foundation for funding season one of this podcast and to Organized Sound Productions for bringing our idea to life. Please share this podcast with your military family or with someone living the lifestyle. Subscribe to The Military Lifestyle on your favorite podcast app. Your support is greatly appreciated. Thank you for listening.




