2. Distinguish between military family readiness, well-being, and resilience, recognizing that family readiness is a dynamic state that is influenced by past experiences, proximal events, and access to resources.
3. Identify the challenges in assessing and maintaining family readiness in real-time, including the impact of cumulative stressors, the cultural expectation for families to "be resilient," and the difficulty of measuring performance-driven outcomes in a holistic family context.
During a plenary panel at the Fall 2025 Department of Defense Child Collaboratory Convening Event, multidisciplinary experts explored the construct of military family readiness, including: 1) identification of relevant stakeholders, 2) possible definitions of family readiness, 3) differentiation of family readiness from related constructs (i.e., well-being, resilience), 4) characteristics that enable family readiness amid service-related stress, and 5) gaps and next steps to operationalize family readiness. These experts shared insights based on their decades of experience in clinical care, research, policy, and military service, highlighting the complexity of defining and measuring family readiness for military leaders concerned with the readiness of warfighters, as well as the needs and experiences of military families themselves. Panelists reached a consensus that family readiness enables service member lethality and retention, represents a state, susceptible to change quickly, depending on exposure to new or cumulative stressors or access to the appropriate resources. Panelists concluded by providing recommendations to promote family readiness by addressing the tangible needs of families, encouraging families and military leadership to collaborate during periods of family adversity, leveraging extant data to identify salient predictors of readiness, and developing strategies to assess family readiness in real-time to provide just-in-time support.