If you are contemplating moving house and are prone to doing so frequently, be sure it’s really necessary. Not only do repeated moves upset children, they have long-term effects on the whole family.
As everyone knows, house moves are one of the most stressful of life events for adults, risking mental and physical health. But children are also affected. Ones who move frequently do worse at school and are worse behaved than ones whose homes do not keep changing. Frequently moving teens smoke, drink and attempt suicide more. These effects apply as much to rich and poor families, and to children of relatively educated or uneducated parents.
Now comes powerful evidence that frequent childhood moves have adverse long-term consequences. More than 7,000 American adults were asked how frequently they had moved during childhood, surveyed in 1994-95 and again 10 years later. Regardless of age, gender and social class, the more moves as children, the worse the adult’s life satisfaction and emotional wellbeing. They were more likely to die younger, probably because of the impact of raised stress (cortisol) levels.
A basic reason was that, as adults, the frequent childhood movers had fewer, lower-quality social relationships. As many previous studies have shown, childhood friendships play an important role in subsequent confidence and social skills. If early friendship networks keep changing, because uprooted by house moves, this study implies that there is long-term damage to adult friendship-making. However, it did depend to some degree on what sort of person the child and adult was. The introverts in the sample who had moved frequently were more likely to have poor adult social networks than introverts with few moves, largely explaining their ill-being. By contrast, extroverts who had been frequent movers as children were less harmed, probably because they managed to strike up better social networks. Neurotic (moody, nervous and highly strung) people also suffered more if they had been frequent childhood movers: jumpy pessimists prefer childhood stability.
It could be argued that the results only apply to America. The authors comment that “residential mobility has been one of the defining characteristics of the American ethos since its inception.” Perhaps wryly, they continue: “Many Americans move to another city in search of a better education, job, lifestyle and their inalienable right, happiness.” However, there are strong reasons to suppose that this ethos has transferred to Britain. Since the sale of council houses (public housing) in the 1980s, and the massive increase in the availability of credit, home-owning has spiralled upwards — 70 per cent of Britons now own homes, compared with 40 per cent of the French. With the loss of security for people who rent, starting in the 1980s, ownership looked attractive for Britons.
Increasingly, we have come to regard our bricks and mortar as pensions and capital wealth, with average saving collapsing altogether until the credit crunch. Many families regard house moves as essential for financial security and as important markers of status.
In many studies, debt has been shown to be a key cause of mental illness. In the U.K. household indebtedness went up from GBP 200bn to GBP 500bn between 1979 and 1990, and it accelerated from there to a staggering GBP1,400bn by 2008, mostly as a result of property fever.
As parents, not only do we need to think very hard about the potential problems we may be causing ourselves by our addiction to large mortgages, but also we need to factor in the long-term effect of frequent house moves on our children.
