Defence Kidz: The charity helping Australian military children feel seen during a parent's deployment

For the children of Australia's servicemen and women, growing up means learning to live with absence. A new charity called Defence Kidz is working to ensure those children know they are not alone, offering resources, events and advocacy designed around the very specific experience of being a Defence kid.

A childhood measured in calendars and letters

The experience of being a military child is one that is hard to put into words for those who have never lived it. It can begin as simply as a calendar on the cupboard door, covered in Xs counting down the weeks until a parent returns from overseas. For many children, deployments mean months without a parent present, with connection maintained through letters that took weeks to arrive, or in more recent times, through video calls and messages.

In the late 1990s, one Australian family's connection to a father deployed to East Timor as part of the INTERFET multinational peacekeeping task force relied entirely on handwritten letters. Each one felt significant precisely because it took so long to arrive. Welcome home signs made from poster board and coloured markers marked the end of a six-month separation. For the child waiting at home, the experience left a lasting impression, shaping the way she understood both pride and absence.

That same child, as a teenager, remembers sitting at home with her mother watching news reports that five Australian soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan, their families yet to be notified. The phone rang repeatedly as relatives checked in. Every call brought a spike of fear. It is that combination of emotions, enormous pride alongside genuine fear, combined with the ordinary frustration of a missing parent at birthdays and school events, that defines the Defence kid experience.

What Defence Kidz does and why it was needed

Defence Kidz supports children from current-serving, ex-serving and reservist families across Australia. The charity provides resources, community events, advocacy and tailored opportunities aimed specifically at the children who carry the weight of a parent's service, often quietly and without much recognition.

Chief executive Hayley Ann Boswell came to understand the gap in support firsthand. When her own young daughter's father was posted interstate, Boswell created a book to help her daughter maintain a connection with him during the separation. What began as a personal project quickly revealed something much broader: a significant lack of resources available to Defence families navigating the same challenge.

"I realised the significance of the lack of resources available to families," Boswell has said of the experience that led her to found the charity.

The demand that emerged from that initial project made clear to Boswell that what families needed was not just a book, but a dedicated organisation that could speak directly to the experiences of military children at every stage of a parent's service.

The invisible labour behind the uniform

Behind every deployed serviceperson is a family managing daily life with one fewer adult at home. For many Defence kids, that means watching one parent, most often a mother, hold everything together through deployments, exercises, courses and long stretches of training. The contribution of those at home rarely receives the same recognition as the service itself, yet it shapes children profoundly.

Not every military family has had access to formal support networks. Many have found their own ways through the waiting, leaning on friends, extended family and personal resilience. What Defence Kidz offers is something that was largely absent for previous generations of Defence children: an explicit acknowledgement that what they experience is real, recognised and worthy of dedicated support.

For children growing up in Defence families today, having an organisation say directly that their experience is understood, and that others share it, carries genuine weight. That simple act of recognition, according to those who lived without it, can make a meaningful difference to a child navigating a childhood defined by service, sacrifice and waiting.