Sure, sure, but mortgages and kids' needs tend to get in the way of philosophical and strategic thinking.
Why not?
Kids are mobile. Mortgages can be covered by tenants or by selling the property (usually).
I only have kid (singular) and lack a mortgage, but I'd definitely move my family to a place with more opportunity if the well ran dry where we're at now. I wouldn't even hesitate or think twice about it. The temporary pain of transition is going to be a lot easier than the long-tail of fruitless toiling and economic decay.
I was a spoiled kid, I admit, but I remember that back when I was 9 or 10 and my parents asked me if I'd be ok with us moving 4 or 5 blocks down the street, in a better area, my answer was a loud "no way!", because that meant losing my play-mates and God knows what else. We ended up not moving. I know it's anecdotal, but looking at what Hollywood is feeding us (with the latest example being the excellent animation "Inside Out") I get the feeling that is actually hard for kids being "mobile". Parents ignore that at their own risk.
Otherwise my family would just burn through all our money and assets to pay for eating ice cream three meals a day. And we'd end up diabetic, broke, and probably soon dead once we exhausted our resources.
When you're dealing with difficult economic realities that include supporting your family and paying your mortgage, do you deal with them by thinking like a kid? What would be the point of that?
It's important to have the necessary empathy to make the disruption as minimal as possible, but also to have the maturity and forsight to make the decision to move out of whatever soon-to-be ghost town you're living in. Or so I would think.