The FOCUS Project (Families OverComing Under Stress) is a resiliency-building program designed for military families and children facing the multiple challenges of combat operational stress during wartime.

FOCUS is based on leading evidenced-based family intervention models for at-risk families and has been shown to have positive emotional, behavioral and adaptive outcomes for families. FOCUS was originally developed at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress (NCCTS).

In 2007, the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED) built a partnership with the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA to establish Families OverComing Under Stress (FOCUS) for United States Navy and Marine Corps families in order to address the impact of multiple deployments, combat stress, and high operational tempo on children and families. Through this unique collaboration, FOCUS services augment existing Navy Medicine and Navy and Marine Corps community support programs such as the Fleet and Family Centers and the Marine Corps Community Services in order to provide a comprehensive system of care that supports family readiness and wellness. BUMED oversees the contract through which UCLA provides the services for families, as well as program development and management and future planning. BUMED anticipates program funding through 2015.

FOCUS is a resiliency-training program for military families and children to help them meet the challenges of combat operational stress during wartime. Resiliency is the ability to effectively cope with, adapt to, and overcome adversity, stress, and challenging experiences.

Wartime deployment takes a toll on both the service member and family members on the home-front, with multiple deployments often causing additional stress.

Working with the existing teams of dedicated military family services personnel, FOCUS staff assists families in understanding how combat operational stress affects them and the service family member, how to manage stress, and how to strengthen their family.

FOCUS works with families to strengthen their skills in meeting many of the challenges and stressors commonly experienced by military families during wartime, including:

- Children often become worried, sad, or even angry about their parent leaving for deployment.

- Children and parents miss sharing special events together (e.g., birthdays, anniversaries, child taking their first steps), as well as the daily routines of their lives.

- Parents may have a hard time readjusting to their usual roles upon return from deployment (e.g., the non-deployed parent may be used to handling all the household tasks by themselves, the deployed parent may have difficulty adjusting to being in a non-combat environment again).

- Children may show concerning behaviors, such as acting argumentative, disruptive, aggressive, withdrawn, or tearful.

- Similarly, couples may argue more, have a harder time communicating, or may withdraw from each other.

The goals of FOCUS include:

- Helping families to identify and build upon their existing strengths and positive coping strategies

- Increasing parents’ and children’s understanding of how different family members might react to wartime stress

- Helping service members and family members communicate and better understand how each were affected by deployment

- Working with spouses to better support one another in dealing with the stressors that can arise from long separations

- Assisting couples to work more effectively as a team in parenting their children before, during, and after deployment

- Increasing parents’ skills in dealing more effectively with some of the emotional and behavioral reactions that children can have when experiencing stress