Contained within "Coming Home: When Parents Return From War" are good ideas for four or five full-length documentaries. Instead, those ideas are crowded into another thoughtful, compact and compelling edition of "Nick News," this one concentrating on the children of soldiers.

Host-producer Linda Ellerbee calls the show, in her on-camera introduction, "a salute to kids whose parents have served in the U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan" — but "Coming Home" does more than salute them. It also poignantly profiles the upheaval, stress, anxiety — and pride — that go with having a mother or father serving in the military and facing perils many of us can only imagine. Twice as many Americans serving in the military have families as was the case 20 years ago, it is stated; 43 percent of deployed U.S. troops are parents.

It would be disingenuous for Ellerbee not to acknowledge that the war in Iraq is anything but popular, but she and the participating children make it clear that this is a program about people, not politics, and so the divisiveness of the war is only mentioned, not explored. A girl whose father has fought in Iraq says she'd have no problem dealing with "someone who didn't support the war ... as long as they supported the troops."

You have a different perspective on "the troops" when that amorphous term refers to Mommy or Daddy.

For the most part, the program's tone is positive — first when capturing the joy that usually accompanies homecomings. Having his stepfather back from the war, says a little boy, was like getting "that one Christmas present that I've always wanted."

But for many families, as adult documentaries and pieces on the evening news have noted, the parent returning home from Iraq may not seem exactly like the one who left for there. Some, says Gen. Bill Caldwell, are "traumatized" by what they have experienced and "emotionally unable to connect" with their families.

The daughter of one such veteran says "I know that laughing helps a lot" when caring for those who suffer the invisible wounds that don't show up on X-rays or blood tests.

In the most difficult cases, post-traumatic stress disorder can cripple a soldier back from Iraq just as surely as the loss of a limb; the report's most moving sequence involves a father who has come back seeming "very distant" to his daughter and to a son who, fighting back tears, says that sometimes he has to "force him out of bed" to get Dad involved in family life.

With a sadness that is also understandably bitter, the mother of the family says of her husband, "There's a whole lot of Iraq in him. There's a whole lot of Iraq in my kids. And it shouldn't be there. ... But it's here."

For other returning soldiers, the wounds are anything but invisible. In a piece of haunting imagery, a boy describes, and the camera pans, five different prosthetic limbs that his father wears for various occasions and activities.

More than once, you hear the injured parent described as a "stepfather" rather than a birth parent — an incidental sign of the times. Among other telling details, one can't help noticing and admiring the valor reflected in the faces of the children; "they also serve" to a striking degree.

Naturally all is not cheery celebration. One girl says of a parent, "I wish she was just 'Mommy' again," and it's easy to empathize.

Finally, the program does its duty by acknowledging the parents who will never come home except as cherished memories or symbols. "Some kids are asked to make the ultimate sacrifice and to show the ultimate bravery," Ellerbee says. We visit a now-fatherless family who remember Dad — killed by Iraqi rocket fire in 2004 — partly through a memorial tree and plaque in his honor.

As it begins, Ellerbee tells viewers that this will be a program "about courage, sacrifice, change, love, loss and life." It is about all those things and more; it is about intensely good journalism, too.