Washington ? Somehow, Erica Godfrey had convinced herself that if she learned the alphabet, her father would be hurt or killed.

Erica made that decision last summer after two men in her father’s Virginia National Guard unit were killed in action in Afghanistan. She was working on the alphabet at the time, so one day she could read the letters that her father, Sgt. Timothy Godfrey, sent to their suburban Virginia home, each beginning the same way: “Dear Miss Erica.”

Trying to figure out things with a kindergartner’s mind, and worried about her own father, she came to the conclusion that her learning was connected to the deaths of the two soldiers. So she simply stopped. And forgot, or at least pretended to forget, everything she had learned.

Although the family was struggling financially because of the deployment, Erica’s mother, Ti Godfrey, quit her job at the post office to spend more time with Erica and son Cuu, 12, whose grades had plummeted from A’s to D’s and even an F.

Now, there is an organization to help the Godfreys and other families get their children through the hardships of deployment. In January, Linda Davidson and Gail Kruzel founded the nonprofit group Our Military Kids in suburban McLean, Va., with a pilot program for the Winchester-based 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment of the Virginia National Guard.

Getting children involved

The group is offering as much as $500 to each child in kindergarten through 12th grade to help pay for activities, including athletics, tutoring and dance lessons. The Boeing Co. donated $35,000 and General Dynamics $25,000 to fund the pilot program. This month, the group awarded its first grant: $327 to cover membership in a high school ski club to Sgt. Roy LeHew’s daughter, Amber, of Augusta, W.Va.

“We feel that it is very important to keep children engaged in activities they were involved in before their parent was deployed,” Davidson said. “It’s important to keep life as normal as possible so children can continue to be children.”

Some families have gotten children involved in activities to keep them occupied, and to allow them to burn off energy that might otherwise be used to worry about their soldier parent or take on roles in the family — like becoming “the man of the house” — that are unsuitable for young children.

Different reactions

THE GOAL OF THE NONPROFIT OUR MILITARY KIDS is to help support families such as Ti Godfrey and children Erica, 7, and Cuu, 12, shown helping with chores at home in Broad Run, Va. The group offers up to 00 to each student to help pay for activities such as athletics, tutoring and dance lessons.

Children deal with the prolonged loss of a parent in different ways. Grades suffer; children are rude to their parents more than usual; emotions come out sideways or not at all.

There is no official count of the number of children of deployed soldiers. The Pentagon said there are 72,398 deployed active-duty soldiers who have children, and 50,738 reserve-duty personnel who left children behind to go to war.

“I’ve heard stories with husbands being deployed for an extended period of time, 12 to 18 months,” Davidson said, “and children are having a difficult time coping with the separation, and they need to be engaged in constructive activities. There was a concern that it would be difficult for families to justify taking money from the family budget to let them be involved in extracurricular activities.”

Learning to cope

Timothy Godfrey works as an instructor at Manassas (Va.) Community College, and the family has taken a hit financially because his National Guard paycheck is now considerably less. When his wife quit her job, they endured even more financial stress. But Ti Godfrey said she knew she had to focus fully on her children after meeting with Erica’s kindergarten teacher.

“Her teacher sat me down, and she said that my daughter knew only two letters of the alphabet,” Godfrey said. “I said: ‘That’s not possible. She knows all her letters. Something’s not right here.’ I had to find out why she was having this learning block. I thought the best thing for me to do was to be one-on-one with her.”

Godfrey and other National Guard families heard about Our Military Kids when Davidson attended their monthly meeting in February in Winchester.

Godfrey has asked the group for money for summer dance lessons for Erica and for the rental cost of a violin for Cuu, who began taking classes in the fall.

“I think it will be a great help,” Godfrey said. “Financially it is going to help me unstress a lot.”

And the children’s activities have helped them cope with their father’s absence, she said. “It is a great mental distraction. It is helping them to learn and to grow and to continue to develop in a positive way, and that (is) just an endless amount of relief for you when that happens.”

Davidson and Kruzel selected the Winchester-based National Guard unit for the pilot program because they believed National Guard families had less available to them than the families of active-duty soldiers who lived either on or near bases with well-established family resources.

“When you are in the reserve or National Guard,” Davidson said, “you are not living on a base. You live in our neighborhood, in our county. We see you at our grocery stores and at our soccer fields miles away from a military base.”

If the pilot program succeeds and the group can continue to raise money, the program can be expanded to all of Virginia, then to the rest of the country, Davidson said.