Tangentially related to this article, but moving/uprooting children can have fairly large negative consequences that affect them the rest of their lives.
Here's one article [1] that found:
"Elevated risks were observed for all examined outcomes, with excess risk seen among those exposed to multiple versus single relocations in a year. Risks grew incrementally with increasing age of exposure to mobility"
Examined outcomes consisted of "attempted suicide, violent criminality, psychiatric illness, substance misuse, and natural and unnatural deaths."
There are many more studies if you search for them that show a range of affects including worse academic performance and one I found that included a higher rate of hospitalization in kids who moved (although the cause was unclear).
I would fall into the category of kids who did not do well with this. I was moved a double-digit number of times when I was in single digits of age. Eventually, my parents thought to take me to a psychologist to solve the puzzling issue of why I wasn't making friends. The notes I requested from the psychologist decades later included a line from me that went something to the effect of that I didn't get to enjoy having friends, I just got to miss them.
I absolutely missed some social developmental windows, somewhat like the kittens who, never exposed to horizontal lines during a critical point in the Blakemore and Cooper experiment, were unable to perceive them later on. Nothing I have been able to do in terms of reading, groups, exercises, and the like has been able to grant me the easy camaraderie that comes readily to others. Instead I am typically watchful and quiet, on the periphery of any group. Carnegie, Toastmasters, and all of the glad-handing can provide at best a kind of thin simulation that never takes root for me. I have faked it and been unable to make it, leaving me with a somewhat guilty fear that any charm I may have would be greasily like that of any garden variety psychopath.
Perhaps the most "positive" thing to come out of it would be near-schizoid levels of self-reliance and an ability to acquire local accents to better fit in.
Why would you find peace with being stunted and missing out on major parts of life? To be blunt, it doesn't sound like something to be enthusiastic about.
Because the alternative is living your life in misery due to your past, constantly dwelling on something you can't change. People can overcome things to the best of their abilities, and it's normally good advice to at least try.
I think it would be interesting to note how many of you find this an objectionable mindset because of its self-destructiveness, compared to how many of you find it objectionable because you simply cannot stand to be reminded of the wretchedness this world is capable of.
It's the difference between volunteering at a soup kitchen, and recommending the installation of those anti-homeless spikes at your building entrance.
Some of us are stubborn enough that this is the answer. Curse the universe that afflicted me with this, and if I must suffer it, let others know, viscerally, how debilitating it is. Maybe I can be the horrible warning that sparks change.
That idea of a critical period we're unaware even exists scares me. We know of several critical periods, like an infant with their eyes covered for the first two months of their life will never master binocular vision, a child born deaf can be given normal hearing with a cochlear implant if placed before or around age 2 with effectiveness falling off the later it is implanted, etc. What if there IS a critical period for learning how to develop deep and meaningful personal relationships? Everything about modern child life is designed to pervert and destroy any ability for a child to form such relationships. I have similar concerns about autonomy. Autonomy is a very strong need in all animals, so it would only make sense for this to be true of humans as well and we see plenty of indication of it throughout history and into modern times... but we continue to subject young people to almost total suspension of their autonomy during all of their formative years. What impact should we expect that to have on the kids later in life? The disturbing thing about critical periods is that even knowing you've missed one doesn't help, you just missed it and the most you can do is compensate.
Similar experience: a different elementary school for each grade. It's hard to exactly describe the impact it's had on me, but let's just say I have no problem letting go of friendships. I was an introvert all throughout school, making only a handful of friends.
Things finally changed for me in college, joining a campus youth group which functioned more like a spiritual fraternity. I was able to finally create life-long bonds with people. Weirdest of all was I actually became an extrovert!
Now I have very little problems making friends. Generally I can chat up strangers. I do have to work very hard to maintain friendships, but it's something I work very hard at.
Schooled in 6 different schools before 18. I’m functioning (easy to talk to people) but I lack trust. I always suppose they’ll let me down, and I accelerate the events because I’m tired of even arguing and I know it’s coming (I know I just don’t « belong » in any place, so I know in case my needs collide with someone else, they’ll choose someone else).
Coming back to Facebook, I can’t quit Fb or Youtube because they are my only friends. I have some, but they have girlfriends and kids. I just wanted to highlight that addiction usually come because there is a void, and getting rid of the addiction is not so simple. Same for those addicted to alcohol: Stopping alcohol is actually the easy part; Finding friend who don’t revolve around consumption is the harder step. I insist, I’m a functioning adult, actually founder with 2 employees, but I really don’t spin round.
That’s interesting. I switched ~4 times in the first 5 grades. I’ve never really considered whether it affected me much, but have been highly self aware that I don’t really care about letting go of people. I have a vivid memory of yearbook signing in high school, and just getting tired of it, and when people wanted me to write a personalized message, I just said... eh, and declined to do so.
I wouldn’t have thought this was disruptive, but I also recall manually learning how social behaviors work in 11-12th grade and had always assumed I was just a bit of an aspie
I went to 9 schools in 7 different states thousands of miles apart by the time I went to college, and I didn’t really value some of the things other kids did such as school “spirit” which I thought was stupid. Or rooting for “your” team, nor things like prom (parents were poor and still building themselves up so wasn’t about to ask them for funds to rent or buy clothes for a party) or yearbooks or graduation (didn’t even tell my parents about it, didn’t see why it was even worth celebrating since US high school is so easy). I know zero people from high school still.
I am fine conversing with people and making friends, I actually like to, and I think moving around a lot helped me learn the skills to size people up, but I am also evaluating how useful
/enjoyable someone is to me so that I invest my time with the greatest return.
I also don’t care much for personal photos on work desk or other memorabilia and generally dwelling on the past. Just another data point. This is not to say that I don’t care about people, and I do like helping, but I don’t need to get all deep and emotional with anyone. Who knows if it has anything to do with me moving around as a kid.
I moved eight times before turning 18 and relate to most of what you describe. The lack of family pictures or memorabilia in your cubicle sticks out for some reason I can't articulate. I've never done that either and I don't understand why people do, like a pathologically tone deaf person who doesn't understand why people listen to music.
Having had the same rootless upbringing and these same kinds of feelings, I think the word that comes closest to describing what happened to us is dehumanization.
Yes I can sever relationships very easily, and I will never truly miss them. I might think about them, but I will never make an effort to reach out or reestablish the relationship under any circumstance.
Normal people suffer through these things and never sever. They also miss individuals who have left their life. Those are normal human feelings. We don’t have them. We can’t fake them. It’s tragic.
I’m curious if any non movers would like to chime in here, because tempting as it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if this mentality was common among HN readers regardless of childhood stability.
Moving sucked, but i hadn’t until now considered it traumatic. I’ve always chalked up these feelings to being smarter than average and more self monitoring. Alternatively, being comfortable with losing relationships because I’m sure I can make new ones
I would suggest looking into Pesso-Boyden Therapy, which deals with such "holes in roles" - the missing experiences at the right age with the right person - by creating synthetic memories. It's quite an intense thing when a person suddenly gets exactly the experience they were missing for years, just by giving people, in a therapeutic setting, roles to act out.
It does sound weird, and it was a thing I was cautious about when first reading about Pesso therapy. But the "synthetic memories" in no way replace your true memories just as someone who you ask to - in the therapeutic setting - take on the role of an "ideal parent" or "ideal partner" does not replace your real parent or partner. Instead, what you get is a real world experience of how the things could have played out differently, and this experience releases some tension that continued to influence your later interactions..
As an example - if a person was bullied in school, and has subsequently built up impenetrable walls in relationships, it could be helpful to re-enact an act of bullying in a safe setting. Only this time, the person is fully in control and can create an alternative ending - e.g. by letting an 'ideal friend' or an 'ideal parent' join in and stop the bullying. Now a synthetic memory is created - sure, it does not replace the old memory. But now you've got to experience that there are different outcomes possible, now you feel more protected.
The power of this method lies exactly in the experiencing. Before being exposed to this approach I thought my problems would go away, if only I could really really understand them. Now I see that experiences can be quite a bit more powerful than words and concepts. I can also see where all the rituals in human cultures are coming from.
Yeah but still - that is not a thing which actually happened. It is just systematic self-delusion, and an altogether pitiful approach. "I am not happy with the way things turned out so I will pretend they did in fact not turn out that way."
No no no, at no point does anyone claim that this is in any way a real memory. Your actual memories are part of you and need to be respected. They should not be repressed.
What is created is the knowledge that a different experience is possible. Not just textual knowledge, but lived knowledge. Examples of the correct behaviours that you may see in movies or read in books or even witness in your friends are still not your lived experiences. This approach changes it.
I feel like a lot of my therapy experience has been focused on replaying the hard parts of my childhood to help understand the decisions I made then as a largely powerless child and help recognize that those decisions aren't as true as a full grown adult.
This being standard talk therapy and not what grandparent poster was talking about, so the approach he talks about doesn't sound pitiful. Your emotional system (which drives a lot of cognitive behavior) responds to things differently than your logical self.
Also your post seems pretty harsh and judgey for someone that hasn't tried what they've tried, and potentially hasn't had the same life experience.
Thank you for writing this. I was the outsider kid who didn’t move on when all of his friends did. My friends were all military brats. Years later I reconnected with one and he didn’t even remember the two years between 8-10 we were inseparable. If there is a flip side, I have family members that can make friends with a brick wall and they are an open book to everyone they meet - charlatans included and they constantly wonder why they are being taken advantage of.
I only moved once, after my parents got divorced. I changed schools in 4th grade and didn't end up having any "best" (they weren't actually good to me) friends again until 8th grade. I remember almost nothing about middle school, especially 7th grade. This week in therapy I was asked if my parents ever played with me or took an interest in anything I was doing...I realized they didn't. I'm so used to be being alone that I never considered this and I think it sucks more than the lack of friends. My parents were so emotionally unavailable they didn't notice any problems, not even when I became severely depressed in high school. It took more than 8 years for me to finally have a breakdown, 8 years for my mom to finally realize I needed help.
I've been diagnosed with Schizoid Personality Disorder. It's uncomfortable knowing I fit in so well I'm basically invisible and when I'm not, it's more often that I'm being judged for having flat affect which I think is only exacerbated by being female. I don't know what emotions I'm not showing, I don't know any other way.
When I read your post it felt like you were describing me! You're certainly not alone in this. I've long thought that instability of this sort in your early years makes it more difficult to form lasting bonds with people, but on the flipside it also makes you so much more independent. So great to see someone mirror that thought!
The psychopath thing has bothered me as long as I can remember - obviously I can't be one, as I do have compassion for others, but the outward behavior still feels like I'm "playing a role".
This resonates a lot with me. Were you bullied as well?
Perhaps the worst part of constantly being uprooted was that as the new kid in class you are a natural soft target for bullies.
It lead to the vicious cycle of: I'm new and afraid of my new peers, so I'm on my own most of the time, so I'm an easy target for bullies, so they go after me, so I become more withdrawn.
It was relentless and it has made me very anxious of social settings with new people. You eventually learn to fake it, but the emotional scarring remains.
It happened to me three times, once in middle school. The final time it happened to me was just before high school. I never quite felt like I managed to settle in to a group of friends in high school. It felt like I was "new" the whole time I was there. The trouble was that everyone else knew each other from middle and elementary school. I did start over with friends at my university but those people ended up being nowhere near me after we graduated. From what I can tell a lot of people never really left their friends from high school and kind of remain with these people through life but I don't really have any so I just have felt lacking for so long and wished I had that. But on the other hand I know it's not impossible to find new groups of friends.
I would definitely say the moves were very difficult. Leaving the old and the shock of not knowing anyone at a new school had a deep effect on me.
In the part about limitations, the linked paper says
> Although several important confounders were adjusted for, the observed independent associations may nonetheless have been prone to residual confounding. This is because many salient adverse childhood experiences, including most instances of abuse and neglect, are not routinely registered. The underlying reasons for residential change, such as family dissolution, were also unknown. Furthermore, socio-economic trajectories among the cohort members beyond their 15th birthdays, which could have mediated the observed associations, were not examined. Selection of potential confounders was essentially restricted according to their availability, which is a common limitation of many studies conducted using administrative registers. An unknown degree of reverse causality bias may also have been present. Earlier unregistered problematic behaviors among older children and adolescents may have motivated some families to relocate to start afresh. However, it seems unlikely that these hidden biases could wholly explain the strong links observed between residential mobility in early/mid-adolescence and subsequent adverse outcomes. Finally, the findings may not apply universally beyond Denmark, although it seems likely that they are relevant to other western societies with similar drivers of residential mobility.
I quickly skimmed some of your comment history. You are clearly capable of writing much more constructive comments than this. I encourage you to do so :)
It isn't a great look to snidely put down people who have experienced difficulty and are simply trying to understand themselves better.
Anecdotally moving abroad in high school saved my social life. I was a shut-in and never adjusted in the US, but moving abroad gave me a fresh start and let me develop into the person I am today. I'm very appreciative for the opportunity and would never trade it for anything.
For what it's worth, I moved several times during my childhood (my father was a diplomat, so it was to different countries, not just different states) and frankly I loved it.
As you say, each location is a new start, a break from earlier expectations, and a chance to reinvent yourself. I strongly feel the benefits outweighed any negatives.
I am friends with some folks who have lived in a single area their entire lives, and while they do have a feeling of 'roots' that I will never have, they also have a smaller worldview. Not their fault, in the sense that you can't expect someone who hasn't experienced something to understand it, but I'm glad I lived the life I did.
Not to diminish your experience, but I would infinitely have preferred moving abroad vs. bouncing around domestically. Doing so gives you a free pass in some ways, since it’s expected that there’ll be some element of friction for you as you adjust to the culture shift.
If you have friends who immigrated at a young age, I highly recommend talking to them about the experience of returning back to their birth countries (if they’ve done so). Especially for those who no longer speak the language, it’s often a reverse culture shock.
It often surprises me when I hear about parents who are considering job-hopping and moving when they have children that are in the critical 11 - 15 age range. I had read ages ago, back in the late 90s I believe, that the chance of suicide skyrockets if an early adolescent is separated from their friend group. In my later reading and reflecting on my own experiences and whatnot I've come to believe that prior to the advent of agriculture, when most of humanity were nomadic hunter-gatherers (mostly gathering), when the single universally shared concept was of shared fatherhood, and when most children were raised in-common by the tribe, that friend group formed in early adolescence most likely functioned very much like your second family. First you get the tribe of adults, the family you're given, then you get to choose one and build it yourself. We spent the vast majority of human development at that stage, so it's a bit presumptive to think we can suppress it without significant consequence.
I wonder how the ability to easily stay in touch with people after moving through social media, and the increased normalcy of online friends, will will impact the affect of geographic separation from friends of kids who move a lot
Hmmm, perhaps you don't even need uprooting: I spent many formative years in an American-run school overseas, which had high student turnover, perhaps in the realm of 10-30% per year.
Now I wonder what implicit lessons I may have taken away from being one of the few "old timers" as everybody else kept cycling through.
Returning to the US, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that some kids went to the same local schools their parents had.
Are you me?! Seriously though, I was in this exact same situation growing up and I can certainly relate to the other comments around not being great at maintaining long term friendships. Just another data point, but I do think there’s a similar effect in this sort of counter-scenario.
Thanks for those! It just so happens we're deciding right now whether to move our daughter into a school with a better TAG program, but it'd mean starting 7th grade in a new school.
As someone who moved nearly every year as a kid, most of the problem comes from entering school mid-year. Friendships and routines are cemented, and unless you have well developed social skills (I don’t), it’s incredibly hard to fit in and not feel awkward or left out.
Moving before the school year starts isn’t as bad. Half the kids in class don’t know each other and it’s a great chance to start fresh. You don’t really feel left out at as much.
This is a really hard call. My parents moved to a different district at about that time, and it quite beneficial overall for me. But, I wasn't really leaving many friends behind, so that was less of a question.
As an adult, I somewhat accidentally ended up moving step-kids (a bit older), and I deeply regret it. They had far better educational/career opportunities in the new place, but I think they probably would have ended up happier hanging out with their goofball/stoner friends for a few more years.
I put on a happy face when my parents asked if I wanted to move away in the 6th grade. I was a 'good kid' and didn't want to say no. But I didn't want to move, and moving was a complete wreck emotionally for me.
So be cautious. How likely is she to say 'no' if she knows that you want her to say 'yes'?
I don't mean to suggest that moving is never the right decision, but yes those results personally give me pause in whether it'd a good idea to move. Also it seems in general more thought is needed around what can be done to help kids with the transition when moving.
Especially if middle school starts in 7th grade rather than 6th, this is the perfect time to change. In most cases middle schools mix in multiple elementary schools, so the kids are all making new connections anyway.
Are TAG programs a big thing in middle school? At the schools I went to TAG programs in elementary school automatically tracked you into the honors classes in middle school and then high school, but a lot of kids who weren't in TAG funneled into honors any way.
When I went to school, they were an elementary school thing. Apparently they go through middle school now; after that high school has a enough tracks to not need it, I guess. AP classes and such.
Two of my best friends growing up relocated in late elementary and then middle school. Not sure how they did afterwards as I didn't keep in contact much (harder in 90s) but being more introverted myself it certainly affected me negatively.
Your comment suggests that you were fortunate enough not to experience frequent moves and social issues during your childhood.
At the same time, you seem to lack empathy towards others' pain. I am sorry for people around you.
For people in reasonable but not stellar circumstances, the "don't blame others, own your life" advice is probably appropriate. For others, that advice amounts to insidious gaslighting.
Personal experience and reading points to the opposite conclusion. Trivia: amongst successful actors a disproportionate number of them had parents who had jobs that caused the family to move around a lot (traveling salesmen and the like). Out of the people I've met, those who were moving around a lot as kids had a different quality in my eyes. They also often continued moving around in later life. When you grow up in a single environment you find it harder to differentiate what is a feature of this local culture, and what is a feature of the "wider world", because you're stuck with only one data point.
That doesn't seem like the opposite conclusion to me.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that moving could possibly give you skills, deficiencies, and desires that make it more likely you become an actor either, but that seems like a little more like speculation at this point.
Depression is common among highly successful and/or popular figures. I read that depression was common among astronauts after they completed their missions. Virtually nothing that they (can) do later in life compares with the scope of their past missions, and that leads to depression or worse.
These days, part of the astronaut training includes planning for their post-mission goals.
A lot of the more successful, worldly people I know were "army brats" who moved around a lot. It gave them a different view of the world and a greater sense of independence and the need to do things for one's self.
This might not be a fair comparison. One of the risks of moving during vulnerable age is being seen as an outsider and excluded from groups at every new place. But army brats tend to cluster as parents get deployed to a large base, and having other somewhat friendly kids in a similar state can be a big help with avoiding exclusion.
Millions of people are affected by problems in childhood. There are 500 people, tops, on the planet who have monetized the resulting personality disorder into some kind of mass-media fame.
Johnny Depp came to my mind as well reading that. Perhaps it's not such an opposite conclusion, though? I don't want to suggest most actors have personal problems, but having listened to a lot of the more successful ones it seems like there's often a void that's yearning to be filled by fame and adulation.
Here's one article [1] that found:
"Elevated risks were observed for all examined outcomes, with excess risk seen among those exposed to multiple versus single relocations in a year. Risks grew incrementally with increasing age of exposure to mobility"
Examined outcomes consisted of "attempted suicide, violent criminality, psychiatric illness, substance misuse, and natural and unnatural deaths."
There are many more studies if you search for them that show a range of affects including worse academic performance and one I found that included a higher rate of hospitalization in kids who moved (although the cause was unclear).
It's a traumatic event.
[1] - https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(16)30118-0/pdf
[2] - http://theconversation.com/moving-home-can-affect-your-child...