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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

> Kids need structure and permanency. This is child abuse

Sorry, but this is BS.

Structure, yes. Permanency, no.

And certainly not child abuse.

I know just as many examples of people with this experience, for whom it was amazingly positive and contributed to the successful people they are today.

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There is an extraordinary amount of scientific evidence that frequent moving during childhood severely impacts child psychology. I am not even sure how you can say it is BS while throwing up anecdotal experience.

The original OP is an anecdote. Could you link the extraordinary data? I want to see how they can empirically test this

Honestly, you can very easily find this yourself. Multiple independent studies carried out across both organizations and nations have shown this.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4866579/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135382921...

For the layman:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/health/moving-childhood-d...

https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/moving-even-once-in-childh...

https://www.verywellmind.com/moving-depression-and-your-chil...

And how much of this is just correlation and not due to mobility per se?

From the first link you provided:

> Firstly, increased risk for onset of mental disorders between mid-adolescence and early middle age could be a consequence of serious and enduring difficulties within families, rather than being a direct result of residential mobility. Relocation occurs more commonly amongst single parent and step families and those from lower socioeconomic background

It cannot be dismissed as mere "correlation". These studies have been carried out on people of middle-class background too. Esp children of defense service personnel who have experienced frequent mobility. And studies carried out by different nations AND different cultures as well! Mental well-being is not mathematics - you cannot proof a definite cause with utterly no ambiguity.

Unfortunately, you took one single "could be" sentence out of an entire gamut of data confirming mobility-related mental health issues in children and completely ignored the conclusions section in that same paper, so I think you have already severely hardened your position and are unlikely to be convinced by anything I offer.

I would suggest simply talking to a practicing psychologist about this - you would probably be far more convinced than a HN commenter. Actually, this is where I first found out the same - I didn't know about this until a consultation with a psychologist.

(You can also ask your AI buddies - ChatGPT also confirmed it with several case studies offered.)

Literally the first three proposed explanations in the discussion of the findings in the meta-study you linked are correlational. It is only the fourth proposed explanation that suggests a possible causal relationship.

At the same time I doubt anyone would use that kind of thing as evidence for forcibly settling nomadic cultures. I'm somewhat curious because I'm sure they try to do things like divorce socioeconomic factors, abuse, poverty, and other negatives from such a conclusion. But as someone who moved 7 times through 7th grade and attended at least 6 different schools through that interval, I'm generally quite grateful to not have been dulled and stultified by living in one place my whole life. To the point that I've contemplated planning at least one or two significant moves so my own children don't end up excessively influenced by whatever locality specific tints and delusions color a place. (Maybe another way to put it is its easier to boil frogs that have always lived in the same pot.) But I also do think it's nice for kids to have a solid friend group for a good part of childhood, and so forth. I suspect there's got to be a lot more complexity to this. (And I will say I do think there's a connection between moving a lot and loneliness, but I view loneliness as distinct from generalized depression. But totally not scientific.)

Most of your "evidence" has to do with kids moving between foster homes, or families running out in the middle of the night because they don't have money to make rent.

That is nothing like what we are discussing here.

No, this is extensively tested and include educated, higher social-class and stable families. Make a consultation with a practicing psychologist if you doubt the dozens of studies carried out across nations in both the West and the East.

"Even AFTER accounting for family background and achievement at the end of kindergarten, mobile students had significantly lower reading and math achievement tests scores in seventh grade."

"Frequent relocation was associated with higher rates of all measures of child dysfunction; 23% of children who moved frequently had repeated a grade vs 12% of children who never or infrequently moved. Eighteen percent of children who moved frequently had four or more behavioral problems vs 7% of children who never or infrequently moved. Use of logistic regression to control for potential confounding covariates demonstrated that children who moved frequently were 77% more likely to be reported to have four or more behavioral problems"

If you're going to quote studies, you should cite then. Then we can pick apart what "mobile" means to your ivory tower researchers, which is almost definitely not "traveling the world as a healthy, happy, family unit."

Diplomats travel with their families. Employees of multi-nationals travel. US military travel. At least that last group (i.e. their kids) I know does better than average.

Not OP, but he's quoting this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7689659/

Thanks.

It seems to me that their survey intermingles two very different groups – the larger group, those who moved due to extreme financial insecurity (who would do MUCH worse), and those who moved under "positive" circumstances.

The study of Third Culture Kids and the trouble they have is probably a good example of research on the topic that doesn't focus on foster kids.

A specific research paper isn't necessary in my opinion for this site and topic, but Wikipedia is a simple starting point to find some.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid

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