The Vietnam veteran and his preschool child: Child rearing as a delayed stress in combat veterans

Integral to a successful readjustment following his Vietnam combat experience, is the veteran's ability to make the transition from the reflex of combat aggressiveness, to adaptive, nondestructive aggression in his current life. Child rearing has been observed to stress the veteran's working through of this very necessary, though often difficult, transition. Specifically, the activity and agression of the terrible two's and the preschool child, particularly males, reawakens the painful affects of combat aggression and sadism. Attempts to control the aggressiveness in his children and himself may lead to maladaptive coping and symptom breakthrough in the veteran, his child and/or his family unit. Two case examples, one brief, one more detailed, illustrate this observation.Paper read at Symposium on War Babies: Delayed Effects of Warmaking, Disaster and Persecution on Children, Xth International Congress of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Dublin, July 26, 1982.