MilSpouse in the House: Military Teen Voices & Bloom Program

Welcome back to Mill Spouse in the House. Happy New Year. Welcome to 2026. I'm your host Christy Nix, 22 year active duty Army wife. My husband recently retired about a year ago and we settled in the Fort Stewart, Georgia area where I'm currently the head coach and personal trainer at our local Anytime Fitness. Today's episode is one I'm incredibly excited about because it centers on a group whose voices deserve more attention, military teens. And yes, by the way, I've got a couple of them in my house. My son is almost 13. My middle is 17 and my oldest is 19. So this is a subject very near and dear to my heart. Military teens grow up navigating deployments, constant moves, new schools, and changing communities often without much choice in the matter. Today, we're talking about how their experiences are finally being measured, evaluated, and acted on in more ways than me just saying my oldest had been to five elementary schools by the time she was in the fifth grade, maybe four in the fourth. I can't remember exactly but every year of her young adult life, a young adolescent life, a new school. That's a lot to take on. So joining me today to help us talk about all of these things are Raleigh Smith Duttweiler, Chief Innovation Officer at the National Military Family Association, and Kate Sue, Senior Head of Communications for Bloom, a program created by military teens for military teens, and now a program with NMFA. And oh, by the way, Kate is also a senior in high school. Today, we're going to talk about why Bloom was founded, how it became part of NMFA, what four years of data from the Military Teen Experience Survey tells us, and why teens should take that survey right now. But first, before we jump in, let's take a quick look at a few updates impacting military families brought to you by Millspouses.com, built by military spouses for military spouses, including one that's very important for the military teens we're focusing on today. Scholarship season for military kids is now, with deadlines on the horizon through March and big awards up for grabs. Don't miss out. Tips, timelines, and extensive list of opportunities just for military kids all in one place. Find those at Millspouses.com. And we all know PCSing often comes with a lot of frustration. Lost boxes, damaged items, confusion about claims. The Pentagon recently announced a new personal property activity, which aims to overhaul the system. Secretary of Defense Pete Hexeth assured improved reliability and accountability for every military move. You can find details on these important topics and so much more at Millspouses.com. And while we focus so much on taking care of our families, it's important we take care of ourselves too. Talkspace makes mental health support more accessible, whether you're a spouse, parent, or caregiver juggling it all. We'll be right back. Being a military spouse comes with its challenges, but you don't have to navigate them alone. Welcome to Millspouse in the House, your go-to podcast for real talk, support, and community. And thanks to our sponsor Talkspace, getting the mental health support you need is easier than ever. Talkspace is a secure, HIPAA-compliant therapy platform where you can connect with licensed therapists anytime, from anywhere. Now in the TRICARE Network for all TRICARE recipients, for children 13 and up, retirees, veterans, and active-duty spouses. Because mental wellness is for the whole family. Visit Talkspace.com slash Millspouse today and take the first step toward support that fits your lifestyle. Okay, everybody. Welcome back. I am here with Raleigh Smith Duttweiler from NMFA and Kate Sue from Bloom. And today we're focusing on what happens when military teens are not just supported, but truly listened to. Raleigh, let's start with you. Can you share your role at NMFA and how your work connects to military teens and families? Sure. So I am the Chief Impact Officer at the National Military Family Association, NMFA, and I grew up in a military family and I married a Marine. I have three military kids of my own, which inevitably means one of them will serve. I have one who is definitely joining the Peace Corps and then one who is going to be a professional dancer. And if Army has her way, the YouTube recruiting ads have already begun on my nine-year-old. So at NMFA, we have been serving and supporting military families for 57 years. We were founded in 1969, which is the height of the Vietnam War. And this is where like the math we have to do in this room, as women in 1969, we could not take more than $5,000 out of our bank account without a male in our family signing off on it. That means that when our family is in crisis, we were not empowered to go provide for our family in the ways that we needed to while also supporting our military service member. For the five women who started at NMFA, they started at a kitchen table and really were determined to do better by their widowed friends. They put on their gloves, they went to Congress, they knocked door-to-door until the Survivor Benefit Plan was born. And that's really like that sort of radical approach to making sure we care for each other and being in community is at the heart of all NMFA does. So we do advocacy on a hill, we do programs to support military kids and their families, and we do research, which is where we are sort of focusing our work right now. But in the course of that, one of the things we do is Operation Purple Camp for military kids. It's awesome. I love camp. I have elementary school and middle school-aged kids, so camp is like right where we are. But this thing happens at camp where most of our programs end when the kids are 16. And at 16, we lose those kids. They don't stop being military kids. They don't stop needing the support they needed the summer they were 15. They've just sort of aged out of our program. And we started to notice at the beginning of the pandemic that not only were they aging out of our programs, they were aging out of pretty much everybody's programs. And that we had this demographic of kids that we had at kitchen tables at home on Zoom school in 2020 that we knew we needed a better support and we didn't know how. Yeah, that's amazing. And you're not wrong that I had one of those Zoom kids her first year of high school. And guess where daddy was? Not home. He was in Europe. He was stuck in Europe. So I navigated single mom life, a kid doing homeschool, all three kids, you know, at home all the time, and there was not options for me, you know, so that's amazing. I love hearing that. And so Kate, tell us about yourself and your military background where you lived and how you got involved with Bloom. Yes, of course. So I am an Air Force brat, meaning my dad, he recently retired from the Air Force, but through his service, we got to live in a lot of cool places as you all know. So I was born in Misawa, Japan. We moved to Virginia, to Korea, back to Virginia, to the United Kingdom, and then back to Virginia where we're here now. So I got involved with Bloom specifically between my move from the United Kingdom back to the States. It was during COVID and as you know, it was really hard to get connected with your community because you couldn't really go outside and just form that connection face-to-face. So Bloom was a really great resource for me in 2021 when I was moving across the ocean and I couldn't really connect with people at my new school that were military kids or who moved or who knew what I had been through. So Bloom was sort of this online space that I could connect with the military teen community and connect with a lot of people who knew what I had been through. That's really cool. So is it a virtual space? Yes. So Bloom started out as a virtual space with blogs and artwork and expanded into making TikToks and cool Instagram posts and just a podcast and a lot of cool things that is by military teens for military teens. So I think it's really special what we do at Bloom because it's through our content creation by military teens for military teens. We can really create this space that targets specifically what the military teen experience is. That's really cool. And then anyone can learn from it, right? You don't have to be a teen to actually learn what that experience feels like. That's beautiful. So you've lived in some pretty cool places. Do you have a favorite place that you've been stationed? I would say my favorite place that I've been stationed definitely has to be the United Kingdom. It was a really big culture shock going to live over there and especially moving over to the UK. It was 2018 and I was really obsessed with Harry Potter. So it was a great place to go for that. That's amazing. I love that. So tell us a little bit about what you're up to now. So right now I'm a senior in high school at a high school that specializes in fine and performing arts. So I'm there for the creative writing program and currently I'm done applying to colleges, but I am waiting for results. Oh, I can't wait to hear where you go. If you could go to your dream school, which would it be? Probably right now. I'm looking at the University of Virginia. So you'll stay pretty close to that East Coast. Pretty close to home. Fingers crossed. I have a feeling it's probably going to work out for you. Thank you. So Raleigh, let's talk about Bloom's Origins. Bloom started as a teen-led effort before becoming the program partnered with NMFA. Walk us through how Bloom was founded and what it meant for NMFA to bring it under its umbrella. So Bloom, I mean everything Kate said tells the story of Bloom's magic, right? Like we find community and creation when we are co-creating together. We're able to overcome isolation. We're able to do all of this magical stuff that like distance can divide us, but we're able to stay connected. I think that in 2020, that's something that everybody understood, but Matthew and Alana, who are co-founders of Bloom, understood that better than almost anybody else. And with a core group of early Bloomers, they took this sort of concept of taking their stories and using them to find the Kate's of the world, to bring them in, to make sure that other people understood that this experience that can feel so isolating, that can feel like it's happening to you and not everybody else, is something that you can instead connect with other people and find community. We were able to connect with Bloom basically at its first birthday. So in spring of 2021, we highlighted Bloom, which was literally a year old. They were founded in April of 2020. So we highlighted them for Month of the Military Child on social. It did sort of a week-long social takeover where we sort of are highlighting military kids of all ages throughout the month and the last week went to the Bloom kids because they were doing such incredible work. And at the same time, we had just partnered with them. I mean, they were incredible. So like anybody, any adult in the space is looking at these rockstar kids and we're like, what can we do to get involved? But we had already been thinking about how to launch sort of a research initiative focused on military teens at the same time. So it's the first time we're having these conversations. But the thing that happens with teens is that they age and they do amazing things like Kate, who is about to go to college and who is not actually allowed to leave Bloom because I need her to stay here forever. But the problem is that they do, they age up and they go to figure out what's next for them and go build their futures. And what we really wanted to do was find a way to bring Bloom in so that it benefited from the longevity and infrastructure of NMFA as a nonprofit, but then multiple generations of leadership could come through. It's not without its growing pains and we are trying hard and the Bloom kids are trying hard too and that's where I really think the magic is. We spend a lot of time, Kate, I don't know how much you know this, we spend a lot of time trying to keep adults out of your space and make sure that it's not being dominated by all of the adults who have a billion questions and donor dollars and want to know what Bloom says and can Bloom write and can Bloom do? And we stand there, it's really our very valiant program's director who stands there and says, this is their space, this is their work and I've got to protect it for them. So it's what we have tried to do is kind of let them be sort of this easement inside of the greater infrastructure so that we can protect it and make sure that it stays at that heart of like by teens, for teens, but in a way that's sustainable. I want it, my oldest is 12. I want this to be a thing that he connects to next year on his own, find like on his own way there because he needs it too. So that's sort of, they came to us in 2022 officially, but as a program, I mean, I think it's really taken, I don't know. This is like hot take, but I really feel like by last year, we kind of worked through a lot of the kinks and this is our first year trying to really get going in this sort of new phase of what Bloom can be going forward. That's really cool. And so it sounds like you want the community itself to be an organic approach altogether, stay in the teen realm, even the teen find, right? That curiosity leads it to each other organically. That's really cool. So you spoke a little bit about that. What made it so important to preserve Bloom as a teen-led, even as it became the larger part of the organization? Well, so we have a lot of other teen programs. We engage with teens in a bunch of other ways throughout NMFA and that's true. I think throughout the greater military community space, but this is the only place where they are getting together and telling us what their experiences and we can choose to listen. So to me, the value of what Bloom is, the value of what Kate and all of her peers are producing is that it's theirs. We are not sitting here editing and saying, I don't know that a program from NMFA should be saying this about military life. We are stepping back and saying, y'all, like editorial freedom is yours. Please tell the world what you needed to hear. And that's where we as the adults in the room just have to kind of step back and listen. That's really cool. So Kate, from your perspective, what does it mean that Bloom is led by the military teens and not just designed for them? So as Raleigh was talking about, we came to NMFA in 2022, but it's really taken a little while until last year to fully explore what it means to be a program of NMFA. So this is a question that we've been exploring internally. But the way that we found that we could preserve our slogan by military teens for military teens in the best way possible was to have a completely military team-based internal structure. So everyone that creates the content at Bloom that markets things at Bloom, that designs the websites at Bloom, they are all military teens age 13 to 18. And I believe that having an internal structure completely made by military teens ensures that every piece of content that we put out there accurately reflects the military teen experience. What a cool opportunity for a teen that has that creative mind, right, but also the unique lifestyle of a military kid to co-partner in such a cool organization to just reach other military kids. I absolutely love that you're leveraging all of the things our teens are currently into as well. I'm sure you said TikTok. I think you said y'all are making TikToks and you're finding them where they're at. That's absolutely beautiful. So one of the most powerful partnerships between NMFA and Bloom is the Military Teen Experience Survey. Raleigh, you didn't just survey teens, you co-authored this work together. So talk to us about the first year of the survey and why co-creating it really mattered. Okay. This was, I think, the bravest thing that a bunch of teens and researchers have done in this space because we basically threw the academic rules out the window and met with a bunch of teens and said, what should we be talking about now? And we, like, I'm going to couch that with an asterisk. We are in the middle of our sixth Military Teen Experience Survey. I hear from really incredible military spouses who, if you're listening to this and I have not yet responded to your email, I swear I'm writing a thoughtful response. But I hear from military spouses who are moms of teens and work in the social working space or in mental health almost every day about this survey and they are so concerned. Like, are we asking questions that their kids aren't ready to answer? Like, tell me if you identify as a male, female, or if you identify as non-binary. Are we asking questions that the federal government one day might come try to take data for? I don't hold on to the data for so many reasons to include the fact that nobody should be able to get these answers from anybody. But there's a lot of concern about what we ask our kids and that's exactly why we wanted to put them really at the forefront of that conversation when it came to the creation, right? Because as adults and as moms, as researchers, as like, you know, like as a lame 44-year-old, I have a lot of questions about some of the things, but we started with the kids and asked them what they wanted to tell us that we didn't know. And that's sort of what what built the framework. We then met with academics from Auburn, from Georgia, from Purdue. We work, I mean, we have like these stated academic research institutions who are our partners. We met with leaders from DOD. We met with leaders from VA, working through all of the components. Like, is this being asked in a way that's like appropriate from a behavioral health standpoint for kids? Are we phrasing this the right way? The amount of labor that went into, hey guys, what should we ask to like the first iteration of the survey, blew, I think, all of our minds. We really did not know what we were getting into. We are a small nonprofit. It's a lot of like startup mentality on the workload, but I remember when we got in our first draft together that first year, we had a Zoom meeting with 20 some odd teens and kids. I don't know if you were in the room that day. I don't know if you were there, but we had a Zoom meeting where we went through this the survey in its draft form, page by page and question by question with the bloomers to go through. What do you think? Is this an acceptable version of this question? Are we asking the right thing the right way or we've gotten too many adults in the room from like the science research behavioral health standpoint that we've kind of lost the nut and that's where the first survey started. We have done a couple of tweaks since then. We ask, we try to use validated instruments to get a little bit deeper on some of the mental health stuff just as a result of like the things that we have learned are concerning and we want to ask more questions, but we've tried to stay really consistent to the heart of like this is what we built together and these are the things we want to know and we want to see how that changes over time. I think that we had the opportunity through all of our programs to ask the questions that we thought were important to ask 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 year old kids and we weren't asking the right ones. The things that we have learned in the course of this survey have blown our minds and that of so many. I mean, we knew being a teen was hard. I don't think any of us were aware how much harder it was for our military teens. Even those of us who grew up in military families blew me away. One of the things that we have really struggled with in the last few years and that we've done extra sort of scientific instruments around this year is the self-harm rate for military teens, which is more than twice that for their civilian peers. And that's the kind of thing that like I walk a 12 year old in a middle school and say to his guidance counselor, hey, I want you to read this field guide to the military teen. I want you to read our research because you have 17 other kids just like mine and this is something that they experience at higher levels. They're going to present as the most awesome put-together kids and they are. They are so awesome, but they need a different level of support from you, the adults in the room. So that's sort of how that started and how we're carrying it forward. So is this the how many years of the survey? Have you done? This is our sixth iteration of the survey. Oh, wow. Okay. So not even six years, just six versions because well, so it's in 2021. We ran one at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, which is sort of how you get here. Gotcha. Gotcha. That's great. And so what have the results shown year after year? I know you said we're not asking the right question. I mean, that's because like we have these kids and they're amazing. Like Christie, I'm sure your kids are phenomenal, right? And I look at all of their friends and I'm like, you're amazing. Kate, you guys like that's what we take away as we know how hard this life is and the way that you are able to push through the way that you are able to demonstrate the resilience you have built. It knocks all of our socks off. However, resilience is not automatic and there's a lot of work that our kids are doing behind the scenes to build that resilience that we are seeing play out in ways that is a different experience than their civilian peers are facing. One of those is around well-being. So we use a, it's called the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale. And it's this population-based scale that I'm going to get my hands up with. Like if we have the scale, 75% of respondents who are teens, it's age adjusted, should be in about the middle. So 75% should have moderate well-being, leaves us 25%. We're going to split that to the 12.5 on the low end, 12.5 on the high end. Consistently, year after year, we see that closing in on 40% of our military teens experience low mental well-being. That's not 12.5. We're like 38, 39, 41. They sit here at around 40%. A bulk of our kids are in the middle, but not nearly enough are in that high category. It's always less than 10%. So we see kids who are doing exceptionally well. We need to see more kids who are doing exceptionally well. So we see that then, like when we're able to dig into the data, there are some experiences that military kids have that make all of that more likely. Like low well-being is tied to food insecurity, and military kids experience food insecurity at greater rates than their civilian peers. Military teens actually report year after year that almost half of them, or even slightly more than half, depending on the year, experience food insecurity at home. We're seeing it more in our teens than we're seeing in our average population, and I thought, like, this doesn't make sense. I can't tell you how many times we almost threw out the data and went back to the drawing board to figure out why this happens. And then I was on the phone with the head of REC, like teen REC for LA County, and she said to me that this is actually the same data they see there, because what happens in fixed income families, like those of us in military life who know exactly what we're going to make this month, what they see is that when we build our budget for the year, we don't factor in our kids' growing stomachs into that budget. So we're going to build our food budget knowing that as long as you're at this rank and we're in this place, this is the amount of money we have coming in. We don't have any flexibility inside of that budget. The financial, you know, fat isn't there. So we're going to plan for you to have one chicken breast at dinner. Three months in, you're already having two or two and a half. So the feeling that your kid has about their experience is not going to be the same as a budget that's a little bit more flexy because you can go eat at grandma's down the street or your aunt two doors down can take you and all the things that happen when you live surrounded by family in non-military life. Food insecurity correlates to lower mental well-being, as does being a hidden helper. So having a wounded, ill, or injured parent, veteran, or service member living in your home makes it harder for you to have a moderate or high well-being. My kids have a dad who is a wounded, ill, or injured service member and they have also seen those struggles. Like, it's not surprising. What was surprising is that year after year, we see that more than 70% of our teens say that that's them, that that's their household. It's not the smaller number that we all kind of think it's going to be, but it's actually the bulk of our families. So those are those experiences that are just unique to military life or uniquely exacerbated by military life that we see playing out in the well-being for our kids. The part that gets troubling is where we see the well-being move in from feeling to action, right? From state of being to state of action. And that's where our self-harm numbers, we really didn't start asking about self-harm until about two years ago. And what we have now seen consistently is that military kids self-harm at more than twice the rate of their civilian peers. I mean, that's not going to work for me. Christy, I don't know. That's not going to work. We're going to have to figure out a way around that. So this year, we're doing a lot more investigation into sort of the surrounding reasons for that. What else is going on so that we can try to do something about it? There's a lot of research in our space that exists to have a big, splashy release party with lots of donors and really like awesome takeaways. That's great. I love all of those. I cite those surveys all the time. That's not what this is. We really take this survey to do two things. One, to get data that informs our programming and the programming of our peers to say, this is what teens are experiencing. We want you to do something about it. And to build policies that can keep the exacerbations of these problems from happening in the first place. It's really meant to be an action tool. And so that's for us. It's so, so important that kids are able to raise their voice to all the moms who come to me with their concerns. I need your kid to be heard because I desperately need to shape our programs and our policies to meet their needs. Not what we think their needs are, but what they tell us their needs are. Yeah. Wow, that's a lot. It sounds like that's such an evolving process that will continue to grow, but the voices of the teens are guiding it, which is the most important. And it sounds like that's really making it much more effective. So I love listening to that. So I feel like this is where Bloom is really going to shine because I know there are other programs that are trying to get this information, but because this is a teen spearheaded approach, it's shining in a new way. So Kate, can you talk to us about how Bloom creates that connection for military teens and why that has mattered so much? I think that everything that Raleigh has touched upon with the data from the Military Teen Experience Report has really underscored why Bloom is important and why it's specifically so important in creating connection for military teens. I remember that the first time I saw the report in 2021, when I first joined the organization, I had looked at the findings of the survey. And the first thing I thought to myself is what are we doing about this? Because it's just, it's, the numbers are really concerning and it's concerning to me that Bloom is one of the only organizations addressing military teens and their mental health from the standpoint of supporting military teens. So the way that Bloom really creates this connection like for military teens is we're easily accessible. We're online. As I said before, we create relatable content through blogs, artwork, TikToks, podcasts. We started out as mainly a blog and artwork website. The blogs touch a lot upon about advice for military teens, which I think is specifically very important in relation to the results that we see.