SURVEY SAYS

New study finds extended reserve service taking major toll on Israeli children, as is displacement

Taub Center finds educational frameworks, non-reservist parents unable to provide the support that children need

Immediately following the Oct. 7 terror attacks, the Israel Defense Forces called up an unprecedented 300,000 reservists, who were pressed into duty for extended stretches — on average 133 days of reserve duty from the start of the war, with thousands being away from home for more than 300 days, according to the military. More than a third of them — 120,000 — are parents, and approximately 36,000 are parents of children under the age of 9.

A new survey by the Israeli Taub Center for Social Policy Studies think tank examines the effects of this reserve duty on the spouses and the young children — ages 1 to 6 — of those reservists, finding that their extended absences have had a major deleterious effect on both with long-term implications for their children’s emotional and mental development.

The large number of children affected and their geographic dispersal will also make it more difficult to provide the resources and assistance needed to remedy those issues, according to one of the researchers, Yael Navon. Adding to the difficulty is the limited discussion of the effects of extended reserve service on the reservists’ young children. “They are almost transparent. We don’t speak about them directly,” Navon said.

The study, which was funded by the Beracha Foundation, Bernard van Leer Foundation and Yad Hanadiv, found that the reservists’ extended absence from home has negatively affected their spouses in “all examined measures: work or academic performance, ability to concentrate, patience with children and emotional calm.” The children of reservists were then subjected to a “double whammy” — the direct struggles from having an absent parent and also having the other, remaining parent experiencing “mental distress” and thus being less able to provide parental care, according to study’s authors: Navon, Yossi Shavit, Carmel Blank and Dana Shay.

Navon told eJP that these negative effects on the children come amid a shortage of resources in Israel’s educational frameworks, particularly in early childhood education and early elementary school. “There are few staff for too many children, and far too little training for early childhood educators,” she told eJP.

At the same time, the non-reservist parent is also less able to provide the emotional support that their child needs as they are focused on “dealing with daily survival,” according to Navon, a researcher in the Taub Center Initiative on Early Childhood Development and Inequality.

The result: “Kids need more [help] because of the situation, and the adults can give less,” she said.

The survey, which was conducted in two rounds, one in January 2024 and one in July, found that children’s well-being did improve over that time but remained considerably worse compared to children who did not have a parent in the reserves and that the recovery appears to be slow. The study further found that the effects of extended reserve duty are more severe in low-income families. 

The study also looked at children who were displaced from their homes during the course of the war, finding that they too experienced “more severe emotional and behavioral regression” than their peers who were not displaced. Among displaced children as well there was improvement over time but the emotional and behavioral issues remained worse than non-displaced peers.