Children from many Australian families experience a parent who works away in mining, transport, defence, tourism, agriculture and other sectors. The impacts of parental absences on these children’s wellbeing are important to understand because we want these children to not only survive, but also thrive. Defence Force (ADF) families experience frequent and lengthy parental absences due to deployment and training episodes. Globally, research about how children experience and understand parental deployment had been limited to secondary data from parents. To address this gap, my PhD research entitled ‘Young children’s experiences and understandings within an ADF family’ sought to privilege 2-5-year-old children’s voices. This presentation examines children’s experiences which include: stressors and responses, family mobility, increased family stress and parental fatigue, family role flexibility, parents who had given their health in service (physical and/or mental health), various communication tools, protective factors, family and meta-narratives, ritual, acculturation, development of coping strategies, and models for resilience. Alarmingly, the results showed a dearth of early childhood resources to build children’s ability to make sense of their experiences prior to starting school. The parents communicated how isolated, and unsupported that made them feel and educators reported the difficulty of adapting the primary school aged Australian resources. The parents and educators asked for young children’s eBooks, hard copy books, apps and programs. Significantly, the findings have acted as a catalyst to gain funding and partner with a wide variety of stakeholders, including parents, early childhood educators, psychologists, Legacy Club Services, family workers, veterans, veteran services, school chaplains, inclusion support educational consultants, and family researchers. These stakeholders and our research team co-created and evaluated free, online, research-based early childhood resources that build resilience by using a strengths-based approach. This will be of interest to practitioners who support children’s wellbeing and resilience, and family researchers and policy makers.