Topic: Navy Gives New Urgency To Retaining Pregnant Sailors

Petty Officer 2nd Class Nina Brown ’s pregnancy interrupted her sea duty.
Last summer , while stationed on an aircraft carrier gearing up for deployment, Brown, 29 , learned she was pregnant with her second child.
“At first I thought they’d be like, 'Brown got pregnant because she didn’t want to go on cruise,’” said the information systems technician. Sydney, now 3 years old, was born while Brown was assigned to a shore-based staff command in New Orleans.
A few people groused, Brown said, but most of her shipmates on the Eisenhower were supportive when she transferred to a shore job at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base.
Brown and her partner – he’s also a sailor – welcomed their second daughter, India , in January . In June, four months after returning to work, Brown went back on sea duty.
Though she just missed out on qualifying for 12 months of post partum shore duty, Brown considers herself lucky. She’s now stationed on the amphibious assault ship Bataan , which is under repair at a local shipyard – meaning no extended deployments for the time being.
If she had to deploy now, leaving the girls in their father’s care, “my heart would drop,” Brown said. “I don’t think they are ready for me to leave yet.”
But Brown is steeling herself for the inevitable.
“They will get a cruise out of me,” she said. “I’m on a mission. … I want to finish my sea duty, and finish it in full. Mentally, I’m just trying to prepare myself now. I know my family will be well taken care of.”
In an all-volunteer, fully integrated military, dealing with pregnancy is a necessity. But the large numbers of single female parents are something of a mystery to Navy officials.
Single moms with custody of their children aren’t entering the service that way: Navy policy prohibits custodial single parents from enlisting. The number of single mothers in the Navy has grown from an estimated 3,900 in 2001 to 6,800 in 2005. The percentage of men in the Navy who were single fathers in 2005 was 6 percent, up from 3 percent in 2001 and 2003. Because the Navy is predominantly male, there are more single dads in the Navy than there are single moms – about 15,600 in 2005.
Shelley MacDermid , a sociology professor at Purdue University and director of its Military Family Research Institute , said she isn’t sure why the number of single moms in the Navy has grown . But she has a few theories:
Military women may be less interested in marriage than their civilian peers. Or maybe the women have had a hard time maintaining marriages if husbands can’t deal with solo parenting duties during deployments.
And perhaps the military is attractive to sailors who become single parents because it offers comprehensive health insurance, subsidized day care and retirement.
“If you have an all-volunteer labor force with a very demanding job, the only way you’re going to get people to join and stay with you is by offering something they want,” MacDermid said. “People want to have families and want to have a high quality of life.”
Petty Officer 2nd Class Nichole White , a single mother with seven years in uniform, is determined to make a career of the Navy.
She couldn’t do it without the help of her mother in Baltimore, who watched daughter Janaya for a total of a year while White deployed, first on the destroyer Bulkeley and then, a few months later, on the destroyer Mason .
When the Mason returned to Norfolk in May after almost eight months overseas, 17-month-old Janaya didn’t recognize her mother. White, an operations specialist , was too overjoyed to care.
“The hardest part is leaving your child behind,” White said. “Once you’re gone for a while, you still think about your child, but you focus on the mission.”
All single parents, and dual-military couples with kids, are required to file a detailed “family care plan” that specifies who will care for children during deployments.
According to the Navy’s surveys, about two-thirds of single, enlisted mothers have parents or other relatives to care for a child when they go to sea. More than 70 percent of the time, single fathers depend on their children’s mother.
The Navy has a much harder time retaining female surface warfare officers, those who specialize in operating ships at sea: The overall retention rate is 17 percent for women, compared with 35 percent for men.
When Rear Adm. Mike Lefever worked as head of surface officer distribution, he found out that men responded well to monetary bonuses – a $5,000 bonus increased male retention by 1 percent. But women weren’t as influenced by money, said Lefever, now head of manpower plans for the chief of naval personnel.
Formal and informal surveys of young surface warfare officers between 1999 and 2006 showed their biggest dissatisfaction was inability to plan personal time because of job requirements. The surveys also noted that women’s prime childbearing years – ages 25 to 37 – directly overlap with the most intense years of an officer’s career progression.
The improvements that surface warfare officers indicated they wanted – a more manageable workload, work/life balance and a less rigid career path – are keys to retaining qualified men and women across the Navy, Lefever said.
Family-friendly ideas under consideration or in practice aren’t limited to women. They include telecommuting, flexible work hours and transfer into the reserves for up to three years – with benefits – so sailors could study, travel, start a family or care for an ailing relative.
“This is very important, being able to balance life/work for our sailors and the new generation,” Lefever said.
Petty Officer 1st Class Kemi Pavlocak is an example of the kind of sailor the Navy wants to keep around.
Pavlocak is a construction electrician with the Seabees – a career field that’s overwhelmingly male, and one the Navy is trying to get more women to enter. She has already done two six-month tours in Iraq.
“It was life-changing,” Pavlocak said.
Her life changed again in April, when she gave birth to daughter Zizi .
Pavlocak said she’s deployed with women who had to leave months-old babies behind. The yearlong exemption from deployments puts her mind at ease, she said, but juggling motherhood and the Navy has been a challenge.
“You leave this job, and you go home and you start another one,” said Pavlocak, whose husband takes care of Zizi during the day. “I think this might be my last child.”
It won’t be her last stint in the Navy. Pavlocak learned this week she was accepted into the Navy’s Seaman-to-Admiral program, through which she’ll earn a degree in electrical engineering and be commissioned as an officer.
Judith Vendrzyk , a former Navy officer now finishing her doctorate in sociology at the University of Illinois , supports the Navy’s attention to family matters. But, she said, it’s in the Navy’s own self-interest.
“As much as I’d like to say it’s out of the goodness of their heart, I think it’s pure, cold reality,” Vendrzyk said. “… The bottom line is you’re sinking a lot of money into these people, officer and enlisted. We’re putting so much money into health care and bonuses and all these things.
“If we don’t retain them, that’s just another way we’re bleeding money.”