I took my kids to see the new Pixar movie, “Inside Out,” this weekend. It’s an incredibly creative take on a fairly ordinary life event: moving. The story begins when Riley, an 11-year-old girl, moves with her family from her home in Minnesota to San Francisco. Most of the movie takes place inside Riley’s brain. Her emotions – joy, sadness, fear, disgust and anger – are all characters manning “headquarters” and trying their best to help Riley through this very stressful and disappointing move across the country.
The movie got me thinking about my own family’s move, six years ago, from Madison, Wis., to California. My kids were 6 and 8 years old at the time, and I worried extensively about how the move would affect them.
A truism of a happy childhood seems to be staying in one place. You never hear stories about how great moving was for a kid. You might hear about how it turned out well in the end, or how they stoically bore the move and triumphed over adversity, but it’s never a good thing at the outset.
Moving is a fairly common theme in books and movies. Judy Blume covered it in a few of her novels. Movies include such standards as “The Karate Kid” and “Footloose.” It makes for a great story. A new kid enters into the midst of fast friends, or even a new culture, and must make his way through somehow.
Studies abound about the negative effects of moving on children. One published by the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology reveals that frequent moves are hard for kids because they disrupt important friendships. Introverted and anxious kids typically take moving harder. Adults who moved frequently as kids score lower on well-being and life satisfaction and tend to have fewer high-quality relationships.
Both the reason for the move and the child’s age have a big effect on how the child reacts. Puberty is a bad time to move. And if the move is precipitated by a stressful event, such as divorce or job loss, that makes it more difficult as well.
Luckily, I didn’t read any of these studies before we moved six years ago. Still, I was scared I was about to ruin my kids’ lives.
Our move was precipitated by a couple of factors. I did lose my job during a big layoff, and my husband’s employers had been wanting him to come West for a while, so we decided it was good timing. Also, we’d grown tired of the snow and mosquitoes, and the constant travel required for my husband’s job, and we have a lot of family in California.
Each of our kids reacted to the move differently. Malcolm, who was 8 and has never liked change, didn’t want to go. Lux, who loves change and adventure, was ready immediately. We sweetened the deal by allowing them to miss two weeks of school while we traveled to our new home (We’d tried to move in the summer but hadn’t been able to sell our house in time.) and by promising them we’d get a dog once we settled in here.
That five-day trip with our car and moving van down through Illinois and Missouri, then across Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, was so stressful, but also had moments of joy. We got to see the country, listen to books on tape, watch movies in the backseat, eat lots of McDonald’s and stay in hotels, some nice and some crummy. When we arrived at my mom’s condo in Temecula, we had five days to find a place in Long Beach and move in before we had to turn in our moving van. Somehow it all came together.
The first day on our new street, Malcolm and I were outside and saw a woman walking her dogs. Malcolm called out to her, “Hey, do you have a kid?”
She did, and Janet and her son became our first new friends in California.
I do think the age of the kids matters. Neither Malcolm nor Lux would shout to a stranger on the street now, and that chance meeting made our lives here so much better. I’m still friends with Janet, and she introduced me to a lot of my other friends here. Our circle grew from that first new person.
Now, six years later, Malcolm never wants to leave California, and Lux misses Wisconsin. Despite being happy here, she’s always thinking about change.
When we were going through that move, I remember trying to reassure Malcolm by telling him that home was wherever the four of us were together. The state or city or actual house wasn’t what mattered.
Later during the trip, he joked about it, asking me when we were in the car, or at a motel, “Is this home now?”
But I still think that’s what’s important. If the family is intact and happy, then the move won’t matter so much in the long run. Home is a fluid concept, and I find it’s better to connect the idea of home to people, rather than to a specific place. It also helps if you’re lucky and meet a nice person the first day.
Contact the writer: Twitter: @heatherskylerhskyler@ocregister.comheatherskyler.com
