<p>Aggregate participant characteristics.</p>

Parents consequently became continuity brokers who carried records, rebuilt professional relationships and repeatedly legitimised their children's needs. Military welfare and informal networks could provide meaningful practical and emotional help, but access depended heavily on local knowledge, individual champions and geographic proximity. Advocacy generated occupational, financial and emotional costs that were often gendered.

Deployment further redistributed care, disrupted routines and reverberated across caregiver wellbeing, child regulation and serving personnel's work. Parents also described meaning, pride and solidarity, while resisting uses of “resilience” that shifted responsibility from systems to families. These findings identify a policy-implementation gap: commitments to avoid service-related disadvantage do not consistently translate into portable, neurodiversity-informed support.

Greater continuity across postings, transparent inter-agency handovers, knowledgeable welfare provision and deployment-sensitive respite are required.</p></div>