The Navy ports of Hampton Roads and other coastal military installations throughout the country bustle with activity when ships leave for deployments overseas. Children and spouses line the piers, waving their farewells as the ships pull away on their six-month missions.

But what happens to the children when mommy or daddy leaves on a Navy cruise? Michelle Kelley, associate professor of psychology, recently finished a unique study looking at the separation issues.

Kelley's research reveals that children of deployed mothers experience higher levels of sadness and anxiety and exhibit higher levels of behavioral problems than children with nondeployed Navy mothers.

Today, the Navy's ranks include more than 50,000 women sailors, 40 percent of whom have children and 2,500 of whom are single mothers. For deploying mothers, the issues of separation include: the missing of developmental milestones; negative child behaviors before, during and after deployment; the quality of child care during the mother's absence; and feelings of guilt about deployments.

In addition to discussing her findings and some of the problems, anxieties and difficulties the children encounter, Kelley highlights warning signals and offers suggestions and solutions for military parents.

Kelley says that while there is a good amount of documentation on what happens to both parent and child when fathers deploy - she herself did a study on fathers deploying during the Gulf War - there has been virtually no research on the impact when mothers deploy.

For her study, Kelley collected data on women from virtually every ship with mixed-gender crews in the Norfolk area that deployed during the last three years, including the aircraft carriers Roosevelt and Stennis, the destroyers Hayler, Barry, Laboon and Briscoe, the cruiser Vella Gulf, the salvage ship Grasp, the amphibious assault ship Wasp and the dock landing ship Tortuga.