# Families — The Second Sustainment System

**Semantic kernel:** Families and chosen networks often carry scheduling, care, records, transportation, income shocks, grief, advocacy, and ordinary continuity after formal military systems recede.

## Grounded anchor

Family, caregiver, peer, and chosen-network support can connect military service to civilian life, health care, benefits, work, education, housing, parenting, grief, disability, memory, and crisis response. Vet Center guidance includes eligible family participation when it supports a Veteran's or service member's goals and specified bereavement services.

## Moving toward

Visible and shared care labor, participant Consent, boundaries, respite, resources, mutual support, professional help when needed, and institutional responsibility that does not disappear into the household.

## Moving away

One person becomes the permanent driver, scheduler, recorder, advocate, translator, income buffer, historian, and crisis system. Love is treated as unlimited capacity and institutional gaps become private duty.

## Sense → Choose → Act → Learn

- **Sense:** Ask who is carrying which work, with what resources, authority, consent, time, and strain.
- **Choose:** Include boundaries, respite, redistribution, official navigation, peer support, professional care, or saying no.
- **Act:** Make participant-authorized handoffs and protect private information. Family status alone does not grant universal access or authority.
- **Learn:** Notice which support actually helped, which burden moved rather than disappeared, and what the institution must repair.

## Questions

- Which system is functioning only because a household absorbs its failures?
- What care is freely chosen, and what care has become structurally compulsory?
- Where would a warm handoff protect both the Veteran and the relationship?

## Smallest practice

Map one week of invisible support as tasks, time, travel, paperwork, emotion, money, and recovery. Do not assign blame; identify the missing Resource or institutional responsibility.

## Current official pathway

Vet Center eligibility and family services: <https://vetcenter.va.gov/VETCENTER/eligibility.asp>
