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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

People with mortgages and kids don't move to new places where there's more, or at least more immediate, economic opportunity?

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.

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> Kids are mobile

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.

Kids are hardly mobile. Remember that they're kids and may not be capable of coping fully with losing their friends and familiar surroundings to a different place with no guarantee of things being better for them. Minor anecdote, when I moved from Canada to USA in my childhood, my little brother who was 12 at the time tried to run away to avoid losing all his friends he had made.

A kid living in a household where neither parent can adequately provide for them because the economic opportunities are shrinking and offering no signs of ever improving, which often results in other toxic environmental conditions (stress about money, substance abuse, divorce, etc.), seems to me to be almost always worse than relocating to a new place in the long-term.

That's an adult view of things, not a kid's view. Most kids would rather stay and be a little poorer. What kids don't know is how bad things could get. They have no idea yet what it's like to live without safety nets.

Yes, and I'm an adult making decisions as an adult, not making decisions like a child would.

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.

I don't see how this relates to my point in that children are not necessarily mobile (interpreted as moving easily with minimal stress or effort) because of the scope of thinking a child trends to be limited to.

let me tell you, moving away from all friends can be tough for a kid. some cope with it well, some not at all, most are somewhere in the middle. I know I didn't enjoy my experience to say at least...

Same here. We moved when I was 6, 10, 12, and 16. A shy, introverted geek in the 70s and early 80s had it hard enough without that.

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