How Frequent Moving Impacts Kids
I lived in the same city in the same house for my entire childhood. As such, I could only imagine what it was like to pack up my belongings and move on down the road. But imagine it I did. Despite the stability that came with my father’s steady employment, I envied the kids who got to move away. I imagined they were heading off to adventure and excitement and I wanted to go too.
Considering my wanderlust, it’s no surprise that I married a man whose job involved frequent relocation. But after several cross-country moves and the addition of a child to the family, I began to reconsider the wisdom of pulling up stakes and starting over every few years. Our last move was traumatic and difficult for our 7-year-old. After seeing what she went through, we vowed that we would never move again. And according to a recent study, that decision may very well spare her an unhappy adulthood.
The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finds that frequent moves can not only have a negative impact on a child, but can also impact their lives long after they’ve reached adulthood.
University of Virginia psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi says that adults who were serial movers as children tend to report fewer “quality” social relationships, have lower “life satisfaction” and a low sense of “well-being.” The study, which tracked more than 7,000 adults, also found a relationship between childhood residential mobility and lifespan, with the frequent movers more likely to have died by the time researchers returned to follow up ten years later.
However, a childhood marked by frequent moving didn’t spell doom for everyone. While the researchers found that children who could be described as introverts (moody, high strung or nervous), definitely suffered, extroverted kids seemed to be unaffected by their transient childhoods.
Other research suggests that in addition to personality, the reason for relocating and a child’s age also come into play when it comes to the impact of moving. While military brats tend to do okay because they have lots of support to ease their transitions, those who move due to job relocation, divorce or death don’t fare as well. And middle schoolers, who are usually in the throes of puberty, find leaving their friends and familiar surroundings more difficult than younger and even older kids.
My husband left a career he loved so we wouldn’t have to move anymore. It was a financial and personal sacrifice for us, but I have no doubt it was the right thing to do. We have promised her that there will be no more moves and, knock wood, there won’t be.
Image: Clintus McGintus/Flickr
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Military brats do better not because of any social support but because when you move you are surrounded by other kids that have moved too and they are more inclusive. Non-military children show little empathy for people not like themselves.
We moved every 2 years when I was growing up, because my dad was in the military. It was normal for us and everyone I knew. I remember being very annoyed when my parents separated and I realized I’d have to stay in the same place for years to come.
I wouldn’t move and disrupt my kids’ life.
I have no connection to the military, but moved every few years growing up. My mother rehabbed Victorian houses which we lived in while working on them, and when we finished, we’d sell and move on to the next house. I would describe myself as an introvert, although I define it quite differently than “moody, high strung or nervous”, and I’m an only child. Upon hearing about my childhood, people often say “Wasn’t that awful moving around constantly?” And honestly, no. I loved my life, I loved our houses, I loved going new places and meeting new people. It was wonderful. I recognize the drawbacks to such a lifestyle, but I believe the reason I was not negatively affected by growing up that way is that I have a very supportive, close-knit extended family who live all over the world, and especially, that my mother didn’t treat my friendships as disposable simply because I was a child. I’ve noticed that tendency in parents, both when I was a child, and much more often since then. It often seems many adults think that when children move, they can leave behind all their friends and just make new ones, as if these people aren’t all that important to their children. My mother made a point of helping me keep in touch with, and often go visit my friends from places we had left. Of course not all of these friendships survived for very long, but a few have made it from age 8 to adulthood. Most importantly, I didn’t feel resentment at being taken away from people I cared about.It gave me a sense of continuity, to be able to tell my friends from my old town what the new one was like, and sometimes to have them come see my new house. I believe it also taught me that people will come and go in your life, but people are NOT disposable, and individual relationships are important even when they’re not convenient. Of course that’s not the entire issue, and the situation is different for each family, but it irks me to no end when people assume that moving around a lot as a child was miserable and caused some sort of emotional damage.
I would guess that the number of families moving ‘just because’ is pretty low. Aren’t most people where they are because of jobs, or moving where they’re moving to because of a job? It’s certainly true that adjusting to a new place and new people can be difficult, but it may be ultimately less difficult than adjusting to extremely reduced economic circumstances. This strikes me as one of those parenting ‘choice’ issues that’s really only a matter of choice for a small subset of people.
Since when does introvert = “moody, high strung or nervous”?
I moved several times as a child and several more times as an adult. I have found some places to me less hospitable to newcomers than others. In New England, folks seemed to expect to be able to place anyone they meet according to their local home town or neighborhood, and because I was from outside they didn’t know what to do with me — and more-so because I didn’t arrive directly from a long-time home state. Places with more transient populations, like suburban Denver were easier. I now live in a college town, which is full of people like me, people from different places who have followed interesting and complicated pathways.
This is a great article. I moved… many times as a child. To give you an idea, I went to the same high school all four years, the same middle school all 3 years, but altogether, I attended 9 different schools before I graduated. That’s 7 schools during elementary school that I attended, and that’s not including the time where we moved back to an old neighborhood and so I returned to a former school. It was very stressful for me. I can attest that even now, it takes (I feel) some pretty dedicated work on my part to accept that some people will stay in my life, and to allow myself to get attached to them. I keep having that feeling of, “oh no, when are they going to leave?”. It bites. My daughter is fortunate enough to at least still be living in the same zip code her whole life. She’s five now and is starting kindergarten this fall. I’d love for her to remain in the same elementary school all 6 years. One of my biggest fixations on her is that she gets a substantially stable living situation, as much as humanly possible. I’d rather her be bored than distraught as I was.