Within the first few years of a police officer’s career, they go through several cultural changes as they learn their new role as a police officer. The officer goes from a recruit in the academy to an officer in training, to eventually realizing functioning as a solo capable officer. As the officer is going through these cultural changes, a problem can occur as the officer’s spouse and family are not going through the same changes, causing stress in their relationship (Battle, 2011). Forty percent of police officers in a study reported having difficulties balancing the career and family responsibilities, and 37% said they were currently going through family-related problems (Smith, 2015).
Police job stress has a much higher negative impact on couple interaction than physical exhaustion. Police officers who experienced stress spent time away from their families, did not participant in family matters, outbursts of anger, unhappy marriages, and other detrimental effects (Fucigna, 2019 & Kaye, Javidi, Normore, & Ellis, 2020). Many officers place precedence on work over family time, which becomes especially noticed on holidays, special occasions, and continually working overtime and extra shifts (Kaye et al., 2020). Many police officers develop emotional conditions such as anger and cynicism, which can cloud their judgment and create complicated interaction patterns with their spouses, leading to difficult or failed marriages (Tessieri-Hochuli, 2018). Studies have found that police officers’ divorce rate is much higher than the 50% national average, at approximately 60% to 70% (Gibson, 2020).
A challenge for many police officers is making the difficult and, at times, conflicting shifts from being a police officer at work and a spouse or parent at home. Spouses of officers can resent the career when they notice changes in the officer’s behavior, and the officer’s primary focus is their career instead of their family (Battle, 2011). Many police spouses reported the top causes of stress were due to aspects of the officer’s job, including fear of the officer being hurt or killed, shift work, overtime, and the officer sharing too little or too much of the job with them (Violanti et al., 2018). Learning the appropriate amount of information about the job to share with their spouse has a positive impact on the officer’s emotional well-being and the spouse’s emotional well-being and positively impacts the marriage (Gibson, 2020 & Battle, 2011).
Law enforcement agencies must make spouse and family training and engagement an integral part of their employee wellness plan, as supporting the wellness of officer’s families is critical in supporting their officer’s wellness (US DOJ LEMHWA, 2019). Family engagement can take many forms and includes spouse academies to increase the spouse’s knowledge of the officer’s work and the organizational environment, family training to explain police behaviors, and the effects of the career on the family, support groups, and individual or family counseling. Whether departments have their own psychological services or contract them out, departments must make these services available to spouses, significant others, and children of employees with or without the participation of the employee themselves (Kaye et al., 2020). According to Heyman, Dill, and Douglas (2018), “family training programs alert family members to the warning signs of depression, PTSD, substance abuse, and suicide, so that families can look out for their loved ones and refer them to care if needed” (p. 30).