Imagine you are in the 5th grade, you just moved into a new town and you’ll be going to a new school with new people and a new environment. During your first year there you spend time getting to know people, getting to know the town and adjusting to its lifestyle. The second year you feel settled, you’ve found your group of friends, and have taken a liking to the environment. Your third year there you find out you have to do the same thing all over again in a new place with new people and a new environment. That is the typical lifestyle of a military kid. 

The life of a military kid parallels one of a nomad, moving every 2-4 years depending on what parents do. Kids with active-duty parents are the ones who move more compared to those with parents that are reservists or in the national guard because those jobs aren’t as mobilized unless in times of war or emergency. All that moving around comes with positives and negatives that military kids forever hold as a part of their lives. 

Dariel Cantu, a junior here at North Penn, moved from Arizona in 2020 as his dad is currently serving in the Marines. Cantu enjoys North Penn because he doesn’t feel separated from his peers by his military experiences and is treated the same as everyone else. Being a military kid gave him diverse opportunities he wouldn’t take back such as living in Japan for 3 years. 

“I think being a military kid definitely gave me multiple opportunities to travel the world and meet new people so I will always be grateful for that…When it comes to my personal life and social life I think it helped me more than affected me by having to meet new people and interact with others from different cultures,” Cantu stated. 

North Penn’s Aerospace Science Instructor, Jean André Parmiter, who is retired Air Force, shared his perspective of what it was like to witness his son grow up as a military kid. He was serving when his son was born up until he was fourteen which has positives and negatives on an adolescent life. Those positives include being close with family because they are with you every time you move, you become adaptable, and you learn to make friends quickly. As for the negative side, there is almost constant movement which means change in the environment and surrounding people. Families also sometimes have to deal with a parent being deployed separated by time zones and hundreds of miles. It can be mentally and physically taxing for families to be split apart and have to pick up more slack which involves developing new routines that the other parent will have to adjust to when returning home. 

“You move a lot…If a family moves into a military area like near a base there are a lot of other kids in a similar situation.  While you make friends quickly, you also lose friends a lot when they move because they also move a lot.  In a school like North Penn, there are very few kids from military families…From 2001-2021 there were a lot of service members who were being deployed to active combat zones.  This is particularly difficult for military kids.  Having a parent be gone for 6-18 months is difficult enough.  Knowing that your parent is in danger the entire time is extremely stressful,” Parmiter shared. 

Although military kids aren’t extremely different from their civilian peers there are few things that set them apart other than their experiences. For instance, they have a separate military ID that can’t be used for much besides getting on bases and sometimes a small discount at certain stores such as Home Depot. They also have a deeper appreciation for the holidays Veterans Day and Memorial Day as they often know people those holiday’s connect to. 

“In many cases, you can’t tell that the kids are from a military family.  While they might wear military unit t-shirts or clothing sometimes, they regularly dress like other students.  They might have an accent from growing up in another part of the country.  They might use military slang or jargon, or talk about places that don’t exist in the civilian world.  My son was talking to his friends about going to the BX (Base Exchange, a department store on a base), and the commissary (a grocery store on a base), and none of his friends knew what he was talking about,” Parmiter remarked. 

Jean-Marc Parmiter, Jean André son, entered the North Penn district in 2017, graduated in 2021, and now attends Slippery Rock University. As a kid, he moved every 4 years living in Texas, Arkansas, Florida, New Jersey, and now Pennsylvania. He conveyed being grateful for the experiences he was given due to his dad’s service such as flying space available to Europe and the tropical setting of Pensacola, Florida but also expressed feelings of uncertainty about his military experience that it wasn’t good nor bad but rather stressful considering his dad was deployed. 

“My dad was deployed to Afghanistan and I remember that deployment vividly. Granted he wasn’t in the FOB [forward operating base], he was at Kabul International Airport, but like how do you explain that to someone? That constant fear and anxiety for months. Some days you’d be doing just fine and then you would hear about a firefight that happened on the news. It didn’t happen anywhere near where your dad is stationed, but it reminds you that he is somewhere where the danger is real. He signed up for that, he made that choice, but I didn’t. I had no say in the matter, I was just born into it by random chance, and you gotta put on a strong face and smile because you want him to be happy in such a boring and scary place,” Parmiter said. 

North Penn junior McKenna Grazioso is also a military kid for the majority of her life. Her father served as a sergeant in the Marine Corps for eighteen years and retired when she was twelve years old. She lived in Okinawa and Iwakuni Japan and even had siblings born in Okinawa as well as it was the place she started her school career with kindergarten and first grade. She feels that being a military kid sets her apart from others at North Penn and was an amazing learning experience because military kids experience unique things that others don’t have the chance to as well as being raised with a Marine parent means being taught to be tougher.  

“I think being a child who had to play a part in the military taught me so many things, and has added to a few aspects of my personality. It taught me to adapt to chronically changing environments, as my living situation, and the people I was around were ever-changing and hardly ever stable. It taught me a lot about people, and how you can never assume what they’ve been through, or make fun of them for their differences because you never know what they’ve gone through. You don’t live their story, and you will only ever know as much as they tell you,” Grazioso expressed.

Being a military kid socially defines much of one’s life, for Grazioso she enjoyed being able to meet a variety of people from around the world each with a unique life story. There was also the comfort of finding commonality between other military kids because everyone experiences moving and the inconsistencies that come with it but Grazioso shared how it was hard saying goodbye to friends so frequently and that even after five years of not moving she fears she will lose the friends she’s made. Even if the negative aspect of moving around a lot she finds more comfort in the positives and how it shaped her to be the person she is today. 

“Being a military child is something that I will carry with me for the rest of my life…One of the reasons I can relate to people easily is simply because being in a family that always had constant changing factors caused me to experience an entire lifetime of memories in just a decade. Being a military child is something that’s important to why I am who I am, it’s a part of my identity, and I think that’s an amazing thing,” Grazioso remarked.