A military brat is the child of a serving or retired military personnel. Military brats are associated with a unique subculture and cultural identity. A military brat's childhood or adolescent life may be immersed in military culture to the point where the mainstream culture of their home country may seem foreign or peripheral. In a number of countries where there are military brat subcultures, the child's family moves great distances from one non-combat assignment to another for much of their youth. For highly mobile military brats, a mixed cultural identity often results, due to exposure to numerous national or regional cultures. Within military culture, the term military brat is not considered to be a pejorative, but rather connotes affection and respect. War-related family stresses, including long-term war-related absence of a parent, as well as war aftermath issues, are common features of military brat life in some countries, although the degree of war-involvement of individual countries with military brat subcultures may vary.
Life and culture
A common pattern in these subcultures is a heavy childhood and adolescent immersion in military culture to the point of marginalizing one's national civilian culture. This is characterized by a strong identification with military culture rather than civilian culture. Another term for this is the "militarization of childhood". In a number of countries where military brat subcultures occur, there may also be an itinerant or modern nomadic lifestyle involved as the child follows their military parent from base to base, in many cases never having a hometown. It also can involve living outside of one's home country at or near overseas military bases in foreign cultures, or in regions within one's home country far from one's home region, along with experiences of significant cultural difference in either case. Highly mobile Military brat subcultures have also been described as modern nomadic or peripatetic subcultures.
Use of term
The term military brat occurs within military cultures in Australia, India, Canada, Pakistan the Philippines, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Military-dependent subcultures, also known as camp followers, have existed in many parts of the world for thousands of years. In the United Kingdom the generic expression military brat is not normally used. The equivalent is scale e brat or service brat, but more normally children refer to themselves as army brats or as air force brats. This reflects the usage of the wordmilitary in British English, where it is still often used in its original sense of referring to the army only; hence, the Manual of Military Law, the Manual of Naval Law and Manual of Air Force Law were replaced by the Manual of Service Law. The expression service or forces is normally used as the adjective to cover all three services.
Feelings of difference, military brat identity versus civilian identity
Many military brats report difficulty in identifying where they belong and frequently feel like outsiders in relation to the civilian culture of their native countries. The home countries of a number of Military Brat subcultures have highly mobile lifestyles, or at least significant overseas assignments for career military families and their children and adolescents while growing up, including Canada, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. These military-dependent subcultures are generations old. However, some ex-military dependents have found that their mobile upbringing has actually been massively influential in determining their eventual career in adulthood. One example of this is British actress/comedian Dawn French who discussed her childhood as an RAF dependent in an interview with Radio 4. She stated that she felt that the need to make new friends every few years was one of the reasons she discovered her talent for comedy. She also discusses this aspect of her life in her autobiography. American military brats have also been identified as a distinct American subculture.
