421. Q&A: How can I help my child adjust to a big move?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:41):

Hello, welcome back to the Beyond the Session segment of the Securely Attached podcast. We are going to answer a listener question and I have Dr. Emily Upshur here with me to weigh in.

Dr. Emily Upshur (00:54):

Hi.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:55):

How are you?

Dr. Emily Upshur (00:56):

Good. Excited. What are we talking about?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:59):

We’re talking about moving. I know we haven’t really talked about this yet on the Q&A questions, so I’m excited. Are you ready for this listener’s question?

Dr. Emily Upshur (01:09):

Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. It’s something I hear about all the time, I don’t know that we’ve done it.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:14):

No. And people move all the time so this will be hopefully pretty useful. So here’s the question and the exciting thing too, this is written by a dad and we have not had that many dads write in, so I’m just super excited about this. Double excited. Okay. Ready?

Dr. Emily Upshur (01:29):

Let’s go.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:31):

Okay. So this dad writes in, “Hi, Dr. Bren. I’ve been a big fan of the podcast for years and I was hoping you could answer my question on the show. We are moving across the country for my wife’s job. How can we prepare our kids three and six for this change and are there things that we can do once we arrive at our new house to help them adjust?”

Dr. Emily Upshur (01:52):

Love a prepared parent.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:53):

I know.

Dr. Emily Upshur (01:53):

Makes me so happy.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:55):

So yeah, first of all, way to be thinking about this in advance.

Dr. Emily Upshur (02:00):

Thinking ahead, lots of great executive functioning going on right now.

Dr. Sarah Bren (02:04):

I don’t know when this family is moving, but assuming they are moving … I don’t know. We’ll give you sort of ways to think about this if you have a long runway or a short runway. If we give you strategies for long runway and you have a short runway, don’t worry. I think that you can just fit what you can in the timeline you have. But I love the idea of helping kids visualize and start to physically imagine and concretely imagine what is coming down the pike. So a move, especially for a three-year-old. Six-year-old might be a litle bit more able to conceptualize this, but a three-year-old might really one, not understand what moving means, but also really not be able to picture any other place other than the home in which they’ve perhaps lived for the most of their lives. If they’ve moved before I still think it’s … That’s another thing.

(02:57):

I’m assuming this family has not moved before based on their question. But so how do you make something concrete and help them really visualize it? So I’d literally get out a map and I would show them this is where we live here and look this all the way over here is where we’re moving and we’re going to take an airplane or a car or whatever, however you’re going to … And we’re going to fly all the way over here. And then I would show them pictures, any physical imagery you have of this place that helps them, whether it’s the pictures of the home or pictures of what this place looks like. Maybe you could find a cool travel video online that shows highlights of the town or the city that you’re going to be in. I want to really create tangible conceptual rocks for this kid, for both of these kids so they can get excited and picture themselves there.

Dr. Emily Upshur (03:55):

It’s funny. I start at the same concept, right? Tangible, really pretty concrete, but I do a lot of what’s staying and what’s coming with us, like walking around the house, like the refrigerator’s staying here. We’re going to get a new one. All of the books in your room are coming with us. Your bed is coming with us because I think conceptually children have no idea what it means to move. We say we’re moving and we know more or less, are we moving into an furnished place or an unfurnished place? We are taking all of our stuff with us. They don’t know that intuitively. So I love to really highlight specifically at these ages where children are pretty developmentally appropriately egocentric that all their stuff is going with them. Their toys, like really outlining that I think puts a lot of ease into, oh, okay, I’m going to have my bed. It’s fine. Everything’s going to be great. Now I can relax. I think that really helps. And then I do the part that you just described.

Dr. Sarah Bren (05:00):

Yes, yes. And actually that’s interesting because as you’re talking, think of it like a target with circles that go outward, like radiatingly bigger circles. The tightest, closest circle is what in my immediate life is going to be, what territory of mine am I going to lose or keep? So that’s like the stuff, my room, my things, my home, my kitchen, my house. But then if you take like that concentric circle outside to like maybe what’s their life outside their neighborhood, their friends, their neighbors, their classmates, their teachers, like those are things that are, we also want to help them understand like those aren’t going to come with us. And what you will have of those things in this new place, like you’re going to go to this school and look, this is a picture of your new teacher if you happen to have that yet or whatever.

(05:54):

And if you don’t, you could definitely, I think it’s actually in certain places I think it’s appropriate to reach out to a new school and say, “Hey, we’re moving from out of state. My kid, would it be possible to get a picture of the teacher that he … ” We know what the class assignment is going to be if you happen to know that. If you don’t, it’s not a big deal, but if you’ve got the info, if you can give them something concrete, I like to share that with them so that they can anchor that. But also I think it’s really helpful, especially for the six year old, maybe less the three year old, but in an appropriate way for the three year old too to have some sense of continuity of these relationships, what can I keep? So if I am saying goodbye to some friends here in this town that we live in and those relationships are important to me and I as a family want to support the continuity of those relationships from long distance, I want to help my kids have a plan for that.

(06:54):

If you’ve got a best buddy that’s really important to help them understand that just because we don’t live in the same place anymore and might not see them in school every day or in the neighborhood every week, we can still keep these relationships and they might look a little different, but we can write letters, we can send pictures, we can have FaceTime calls, we can plan to visit and have trips together. So whatever is realistic and going to happen, don’t make promises that are not possible or feasible to keep, but I do think helping kids create that like invisible string sense of connection that like, just because you’re not in the same place all the time doesn’t mean you can’t have a good relationship with these people and how do we take parts of that relationship with us for the little younger kids having a transitional object, like could we get a photo of them together and frame it and put it in their room so that they have an object that they can take with them.

(07:56):

For the older kids, it might be almost like an exchange of things like, do you want to make something for your friend and they can make something for you and so you guys can have this thing from abroad from afar to like feel connected to each other. Because I actually think that’s a big part of moving is how do we understand and potentially grieve the loss of some of the relationships that we’re going to be losing and how do we also create a sense of continuity and being able to keep those relationships even though they’re changing?

Dr. Emily Upshur (08:26):

Yeah. I think one of the things that comes up a lot with the families I work with is also like specific more for the six year old is if we don’t know for sure, but we’re assuming this family’s not moved before a six year old might never have had to make new friends in a long time.That’s a really skillset that you might not have had to practice a ton if you live in the same community and you’ve gone to preschool and then you go on to the … Of course they’ll have micro changes of that and maybe you’ll have expanded a little bit at a time, but this is going to be a big change, a big introduction to a lot of new people. So sometimes I like to play out like, “Oh, how do you make friends?” And like talk about like for a six year old, I might say, we might talk about commonalities or things they like have in common and sometimes I rehearse that with kids because it just helps them have their kind of elevator pitch, “Why’d you move here?” “Who are you? Why’d you move here? “The kids are really blunt. And so I think for the six year old to be prepared with some of that can help In terms of troubleshooting a litle bit of cope ahead, I guess.

Dr. Sarah Bren (09:36):

Yeah. And that’s actually, you said something that really I did not think of but I am now thinking of and I think it’s a really good idea, which is this elevator pitch idea because if this is going to be the new kid, they are going to get a lot of the same questions and they might feel really overwhelmed and stressed by that and irritated by that and giving them a little bit of a heads up like, ” You might get this question a lot and it actually might be kind of annoying to have to answer this all the time. Do you want to have like kind of a thing that we can practice saying so that you don’t have to think of a new thing to say every time? Like maybe one or two different ways to answer these questions so that you feel like, ugh, I already know how to answer this.

(10:17):

“Because that’s sort of like the cope ahead but also have a plan coping ahead for the annoying part of it, because I actually think it can be really annoying to be asked the same question over and over and over again. And if you are the new kid in town, I mean, if it’s a new school year and this kid is six so they’re going into what, first or second grade, they might be coming into a class of kids who have already been in school with each other for a while. So they might get these questions and I think it is helpful to give them some strategies.

Dr. Emily Upshur (10:46):

Or also just some content. I think it can really help like this parent wrote in like, ” My wife’s getting a new job. “I’m not sure how tapped in, certainly not a three year old, but maybe a six year old is, that might be part of their elevator pitch. They might be like, ” Oh, I don’t know, my mom’s office move. “They might not have any idea. And so I think giving them a little bit of context for that, with it being developmentally appropriate, just a few words honestly can be helpful too because you’re right, kids will be asking,” Why’d you move? “And if you’re not really clear on that, it could cause a little distress or just like a litle bit of unsettledness, but if you have your elevator pitch and you sort of have a context, it can help smooth that out a little.

Dr. Sarah Bren (11:34):

And I think it helped them build connections too because I think it can give them some social strategies that make it easier, less friction, less avoidance potentially and then they might feel more ease kind of breaking into a new space with new people because they kind of already know what to say so they don’t get as sort of stalled or maybe even like paralyzed because they’ve already done the pre-work.

Dr. Emily Upshur (12:01):

And then the last thing I think would be like the one thing we haven’t said yet that I think could be helpful is also holding two things at the same time. They could be both excited about moving and also sad about leaving. So I think that holding space for two feelings, emotions, thoughts to be held at the same time with them, it’s really, that’s a pretty sophisticated skill. So it might warrant sort of saying that out loud and maybe modeling like, ” I’m really excited about our new house, but ah yeah, I’ll miss this kitchen. “I think it’s sometimes we overcompensate by being like, ” It’s going to be amazing. Everything’s great and I think that it can mask a little of the natural and completely appropriate sort of like mourning of the old thing. I think that’s an important piece to just mention.

Dr. Sarah Bren (12:56):

Yeah, no I think that’s really important because I think we talked a litle bit about grieving relationship loss and I think that’s easier for us to wrap our minds around and anticipate and therefore help kids prepare for that, but I don’t think we always appreciate the extent to which our kids might mourn the loss of the home and the familiar and the thing like this is a place that they probably have some kind of really intangible but very almost relational connection with and almost to say goodbye to it, just like we might say goodbye to our friend or our teachers and to create a transitional object or a process of allowing this invisible string to exist with not just the people that we’re saying goodbye to but the place. And so especially for kids like three and six, I’d really almost create some type of like goodbye ritual where we’re actually saying like, let’s really say goodbye and maybe we can make a little, I don’t know, it could be a collage of like we could go around and take some pictures of some of our favorite places in the house and everyone can hold the camera and take some of their favorite pictures of their favorite spots and we could put it all in a book and it could be like this book that we make called like our old house and whatever or our house in Fill in the Place that we bring with us or it could be like a jar and we could each go around the backyard and pick up a little stone or a dry a flower, whatever.

(14:30):

There’s something I think kids really need these physical transitional objects and I think taking the time to have some sort of moment where we slow down, acknowledge, concretize this with something meaningful and then bring it with us can be that alone can be just really grounding for a kid and organizing for a kid. So when they are missing it in their new home, they have a thing to go back to and touch and revisit or look at the book or hold. It’s just, it’s a more of a felt sense experience than it is just talking about it.

Dr. Emily Upshur (15:11):

No, I love the idea of a … And I think as a parent, I’m like overwhelmed thinking about moving across the country. So I think it’s like maybe we don’t slow down enough to take that little extra step to do a transitional object like that, an idea of a book or some sort of tangible thing. I think that’s a really nice touch because I think as grownups, we’re trying to check all the other boxes and aren’t slowing down as much, even for ourselves.

Dr. Sarah Bren (15:40):

Yeah. Well, thank you for writing this in. Good luck with your move and thank you for listening to the podcast and taking the time to ask us one of your questions. All right. Bye.

Dr. Emily Upshur (15:52):

Bye.

Dr. Sarah Bren (15:52):

Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.