The study is rather definite. As definite as any study can be. But there is little doubt. Frequent moves during childhood are bad for a child’s mental health. Mental health not physical, and mental health is much more devastating and difficult to prevent and to treat.
It is perplexing to think that people will take their four-year-old to the GP for a “cold” wait an hour, see the doctor for ten minutes, pay him a blue or two for a useless prescription and feel satisfied but find it hard to wait 45 minutes to see a psychologist about their depressed nine-year-old with dyslexia and then grumble about the cost of an hour’s difficult consultation.
In this study a move was defined as a change in residence. A change in residence can be between countries, or within a country or within a family. In this study a move was defined as simply one from one municipality in Denmark to another.
This was a huge study done by the Danes, who together with Finland have the best statistics in the world with figures reaching back to the 1850s. Hear this, nuh!
They looked at all the people born in Denmark between 1971 to 1997, a “small” number of 1,475,030, from the time they were 15 years old until most were in their early 40s, in other words full men and women. They looked for how common things like attempted suicide, violent criminality, psychiatric illness, substance misuse and natural and unnatural deaths were in these people and correlated those abnormal outcomes back with residential moves made by these same people during each age year between birth and age 14 years.
Basically they found that the more a child moved residence, the higher the risk of all of the above pathological events. The risk was higher the more times the child was moved within a single year and it was especially bad if the moves to different residences were done during early to mid-adolescence (13 to 15 years).
Of interest was the observation that these figures occurred in all socioeconomic groups. This was unexpected because it had been thought that “families of higher socioeconomic status (SES) might more frequently move in a controlled manner to attain improved employment or to access better housing or schooling, whereas those of lower SES would more often make unplanned or chaotic moves, owing to acute financial crises or threats.”
The other item of interest was that these were all, as far as it was possible to know, “normal” families and children, ie these were not foster children or children placed in youth residential places, these were all ordinary children living with their natural families.
That of course, has to be taken with a grain of salt. We know by now that what goes on behind closed doors in a home is always quite different to the appearances shown in public. And quite a vision that often is!
The problem is that children need stability. Children crave stability, including those who seem most to resist it, ie the early to mid-adolescents. It is so easy to give up and say “modern children bad” as if they grow up bad with or without our intervention. It sickens me to repeatedly hear people saying “de chile bad” as if the child became bad by itself. No mummy and daddy, auntie and uncle, there is no such thing as “bad seed.” Is you make the child bad.
Children need a secure place within which to grow and develop and try out new things, new ways of moving, of expressing, of learning to deal with problems. Those places must have wide boundaries but there must be boundaries, otherwise the child will rebel even more than they would normally do.
It is those who refuse to make those boundaries who generally badtalk children the most.
Residential moves usually require a school transfer. Relocated adolescents often face a double stress of adapting to an alien environment, a new school and building new friendships and social networks, while simultaneously coping with the fundamental biological and developmental transitions that their peers also experience as part of normal adolescence.
That is a set up for trouble unless measures are in place to assist the child with the move.
For some time now our psychologists have been aware that expat children in T&T, who move frequently from one country to another, with the extra pressures dealing with new languages and cultures, suffer from a high level of mental problems such as those referred to above. All is not always well in those lovely schools in the West.
What interests me as a paediatrician is the effect that short-term moves may have on the psychology of our children who always seem to be on the move, from one family household to another, from one parent to another, from one tantie to another. One morning you wake up and the children who are usually in the street going to school are not there. They gone to the country you are told. Next month they are back, apparently none the worse. But who knows? At holiday time they disappear, some to foreign, others to Toco, to a friend. What does that do to their minds? Their confidence. Their futures?
The mechanisms that explain how residential relocation during upbringing, and in early/mid- adolescence in particular, combine with other factors to produce the array of serious adverse outcomes are not known.
It seems clear however that mobility itself, may be intrinsically harmful.
