Taking Their Message to the Front Lines: USO’s Comfort Crew Tour

As many of our Coast military families know, deployments are tough, especially when it comes to children. Help and encouragement is on the way, thanks to a traveling USO tour group who stopped in South Mississippi today. News 25’s Kristen Durand shows us how they’re taking their message of hope and empathy to the front lines.
“You’re here for me and I’m here for you.” Comforting words from USO tour performer Julie Frost, who like many of these children, knows firsthand how difficult the deployment of a parent can be. “My dad was actually a pilot, so he was gone all the time. Looking back now, it makes sense to me. Oh, gosh, I was feeling a lot of things because I misbehaved and my siblings were all very well behaved but now I’m realizing that I had a lot of big feelings that I didn’t know how to handle and I could have used this show and these tools when I was growing up. I’m really glad we can provide this for them now,” said Frost.
The encouraging message hit close to home for first grader Kessa Arms, whose mother is deployed. She said, “There’s some tough choices that you have to make and it just made me cry because it made me remember about my mom getting deployed.”
And that’s okay, these are emotions shared by many children with military parents. A lesson this USO comfort crew hopes to drive home here at Reeves Elementary School in Long Beach and other schools they visit across the nation. Licensed marriage and family therapist Tabitha Pierce said, “Feeling lonely, having to move all the time, once you finally feel connected to people and then having to move again and having to start over, feeling sad.”
The program, which is geared for kids in kindergarten through second grade, uses interactive ways like the bag of feelings which encourages kids to be open about their emotions so they can cope with them in a healthy way. “The longer you hold on to those feelings, the heavier they get. Usually, we express those feelings in a more negative way. Instead of being able to say ‘I’m feeling upset right now, I’m feeling mad, now let me go in my head,’ go through some tools that are really helpful that I can do instead of to kind of get that aggression out and then be able to make more positive decisions,” said Pierce.