I have a cousin and his wife who did this with kids. They sold everything, bought an RV, and traveled north and Central America. They were homeschooling during that time. Their kids were 5 and 7.
It was not good.
I cannot stress enough how bad of an idea this is unless your children are under 3. Children need structure and permanency. They need friends, not just acquaintances. My cousin did everything else right, but his kids still have issues with relationships because 5 of their very formative years were spent without actual friends. It's really sad to think about.
For him, it was a wildly selfish move that negatively impacted his children. Don't be that guy.
I totally agree this is bad for the kids. Fwiw please try to encourage the kids to break out of their shell and socialize in college/high school/when they can. I moved a ton growing up, went to four different high schools, etc, and had a really hard time being “normal” with other people. In grad school I got a TA position that forced me to do 1:1 meetings with ~300 new students every semester, and that experience taught me how to be more normal. I’m still weird, but at least can fit in with Bay Area engineers. All this to say — I didn’t have their experience, but I think they can ameliorate it
Weird doesn't exist. You are not weird. You are not normal.
This may be different to your situation, but when i was younger I wanted people to like me, and if they didn't I'd blame myself for being weird. Now I'm older, I don't give a shit if people like me or not, and I've stopped thinking of myself as weird.
Weird definitely exists. If you can’t form social connections well with pretty much everyone you run into, you’re weird. You can pontificate about the proper terminology but that’s the one society understands.
I am very weird and quite capable of making friends with people. I am not super extrovert, I need concentrated down time. And will ignore people when I am doing the introvert phase. But overal people find me sociable. Weird just means not normal. It's basically a codified statistical concept.
There's whether or not you can make friends at all, and how choosy you are about who to make friends with, which aren't really the same thing.
As a moderate introvert (handle social situations OK but need the down time to balance), I just find some people aren't worth the effort, and like to save my energy for those that are.
But the weird/normal axis, I'm a little less comfortable with (similarly "neurotypical"/"neurodivergent"). Fundamentally I dislike the idea of letting the most boring people claim normal, in a similar way to how LGBTQ and nonwhite folks don't like it when cishet or white people claim normal. Most of the people I most enjoy spending time with are ADD, ADHD or ASD, and all the better for it. It's not like these are even disabilities, they're just different ways of being.
I'm OK with the labels themselves as a broad, shorthand way of understanding personality types / ways of seeing the world, but I don't buy that no-label people are more normal.
I agree to some extent, and I am getting better at just being comfortable in my own skin, but I think social conventions matter too. Eg I shouldn’t act overly surprised when someone says they’re a morning person, but I should/can do that when they say they’re pregnant. If you get too many conventions wrong, people are uncomfortable lol
Edit: I realized I didn’t respond as directly as I’d like to. I think I do want people to like me, and that’s ok. I think it’s also ok to not care
Thank you for the considered and insightful response. This is obviously a deeply person topic and each individual will have their own take on how they feel.
I think the key point in all of this, which you and others highlighted, is weird vs not weird is very much a consequence of social conventions. It's also important, generally speaking, to fit into these conventions to facilitate social cohesion. There are obviously extremes, which are outside of my considerations here.
I should have put more effort into my original comment but I was in a rush at the time. This bit might not apply to you, I don't know you, these are just my own poor articulations. Feeling like you are weird, or don't fit in, or make people uncomfortable, basically comes down to peoples reflections of their judgement on you. This is inescapable and to judge is human nature. But being on the wrong side of it, for long enough, can lead to a very negative mental state. Having the ability to realise you are not responsible for other peoples feelings is important. And also realising these feelings are largely dictated by the society you find yourself in is also important. These things can be changed, social circles need not be permanent, and should probably be changed if leading to a negative mental state, brought about because you feel you don't fit in.
I stand by my original point that there is no such thing as weird or normal, anymore so than some cultures or societies can appear weird or normal, which is highly relative. Otherwise intelligent and conscientious people should not believe themselves to be less than they are because they are at odds with their current time and place. As Yuval Noah Harari would say, society is a fiction.
Don’t worry at all, I think your original post was fine too, and I agree with what you say! I think some of this comes down to personal preference, how you want to relate to the world, and who you want to surround yourself with. “Different strokes for different folks” :)
If most people aren’t like you, you are not normal by definition.
Good for you that you learned to cope with that. After the ‘don’t give a shit’ stage there usually is ‘sit back and observe’ stage to understand what exactly you don’t give a shit about.
Define "most people"? Clearly an absurd question in the context of this discussion. It's like saying "Most people on earth are not like you". How do you define that?
I actually laughed out loud at how different this is to the usual "be yourself and to hell with what people think" advice. Can you elaborate on why it's so important to care if people like you?
Not OP, but we humans are social animals. As much as we may want to pretend we live alone just fine, it's not the common case. Sure, some people enjoy solitude and don't have to care about what others think, but most of us enjoy company, and this comes with caring about others and what they think of you.
You surely care about what your partner thinks about you. Your parents perhaps? Your friends? It's part of the emotional connection.
You can be laid back and easy going, but you're still going to care if your loved ones strongly go against your core beliefs and ways of living, right?
Also, whether we like it or not we depend on other people. If you want to get hired, reproduce, sell stuff, or just not be a hermit, it matters what people think of you.
Sometimes that means changing who you are. Sometimes it means finding people who are more like you (I know that I hate living in most rural areas based on the people I've met in them, for instance). Maybe a combination.
Yeah, most of the advice is really bad, because they want to avoid the harsh truth: that things aren't necessarily going to work out. You can't sell a self-help book that teaches "you need people to love you but you might be left alone forever". People want a guaranteed solution but that simply doesn't exist.
However, a lot of people, like the person I originally replied to, choose to remain alone, and that's often because they are scared of rejection or of being left alone. It's kind of ironic, like a contradiction. Longing for connection, but being so scared of rejection that you force the rejection to happen yourself, so that it doesn't happen to you involuntarily, but by forcing that rejection through self-isolation you basically guarantee your doom rather than opening the possibility for flourishing.
At the very least your parents need to tolerate you, because you depend on them for living during your early years. So early on it is a simple survival necessity.
It turns out that this necessity never truly goes away. Aside from merely surviving (e.g. you need your doctor to at least tolerate you) interacting with other human is what makes life more than just surviving. At least it’s like that for most people.
Even hermits and sociopaths need to be liked by at least one person, which is their own selves. Since the number must be at least one, it might as well be 2 or 3.
> At the very least your parents need to tolerate you, because you depend on them for living during your early years. So early on it is a simple survival necessity.
Yep, and even a slight degradation of that trust that your parents that are necessary for your survival will protect you can have devastating, life-long psychological effects. And indeed everything can be traced back to that.
Perhaps controversial but I think this is the origin of most religion: baby is protected by infinitely powerful parents, child has shocking and painful revelation that their parents are not infinitely powerful and have all kinds of insecurities and weakness, therefore a forever infallible representative (e.g. God) is constructed to fill in that gap.
But I think that's just one way to fill the gap, and people engage in all kinds of strange, obsessive behaviours to try and reclaim that illusion of eternal protection and safety.
i used to think that moving frequently when i was young was the cause of why i didn't make any friends, but i realized that there was much more to it. if the kids have relationship issues, then i suspect it wasn't the frequent travel that caused that but it may also have been relationship issues with the parents as well. staying in one place and going to school may have mitigated the issue or it may have not. we can't say. my parents went through a divorce when we moved, and we didn't get any help from family or community while my parents tried to sort out their lives. there wasn't much, if anything they could have done better. the things that happened were more or less unavoidable.
obviously i don't know your cousin, but before you blame him, consider that there may have been other factors that you can't see, that were beyond their control.
the worst thing in my experience is relatives who think they know what i am doing wrong as a parent, without understanding the whole picture. (friends too, but once friends do that, they are no longer friends). try not to be that person.
> the worst thing in my experience is relatives who think they know what i am doing wrong as a parent
Glad someone said it! I’m disinclined to take any parenting advice from a peer group that’s been raising kids on tablets for the last 10 years. But ya, moving around is the concern hah. God forbid they see life outside the suburbs.
I dont really see the issue here? Obviously the parents are the stable anchor in that situation, and the kids probably had a great time traveling and exploring the world with their parents. I would honestly prefer that compared to the usual childhood experience you get nowadays, which is sitting around watching youtube brainrot right after being subjected to public school brainrot for 8 hours.
> I would honestly prefer that compared to the usual childhood experience you get nowadays, which is sitting around watching youtube brainrot right after being subjected to public school brainrot for 8 hours.
There are more alternatives than the extreme you're describing.
I am into sailing and know a bunch of people that grew up “cruising the world” on sailboats with their parents. They’re almost all well adjusted, successful, and have unusually good social skills from learning how to make friends with people from other cultures. I think the structure and permanence that kids need is emotionally mature and available parents- the physical part is not the important part. Also, kids can have mental health problems and developmental disorders that have nothing to do with parenting- and it’s pretty awful to blame parents for their kids problems unless they intentionally abused them.
Hol up. Sailing culture is VERY different from RV culture. I lived on a sailboat for years, going up and down the US coast, startup hopping. The sailing culture is very friendly, especially to kids (who are treated more like small adults than children). The people I met along the way are life-long friends. If I needed a ride to an auto store to pick up new house batteries, engine parts, or even to a Walmart, there were always people to give me a ride.
RV culture is much more lonely and expects people to be more self-sufficient. If you need help, there may or may not be people to help you; for sure, the whole campsite won’t jump to help, unlike a marina.
I don’t think that’s true of RV culture at all. I currently live on the road with my partner, and while we don’t yet have kids, we’ve met dozens of families and many more dozens of kids. All were more than capable of socializing and making friends, both with adults and other kids, and could often be found running around whatever campground or forest we were parked at.
Certainly you can live a very isolated life on the road, but just like when living in a house if you put yourself out there there is a welcoming community that will respond.
Yes, I absolutely love how other adults in the sailing community treat my kid with kindness and respect, and listen to them the same as any adult. Sailing is somewhat of a dying thing- few young people do it and the older people are mostly really excited to see kids in the community.
We don’t actually live on a sailboat in the sense of this discussion, but a lot of our friends do.
It’s funny you mention sailing. The couple people I know who grew up on a boat sailing like you describe no longer talk to their parents and long for a normal childhood they didn’t have.
It's presumptuous to claim child abuse, since we fundamentally know very little about the situation.
I wouldn't say it's abuse, but it's certainly depriving the kids from learning how to develop socially. They aren't learning how to maintain friendships, and are being implicitly taught that such connections are disposable.
I've had the misfortune to see actual child abuse, from the story presented in the OP it doesn't rise even close to that level. Let's please reserve words/phrases like that for situations that warrant it.
It may not be an ideal parenting strategy, but claiming it's abuse cheapens the word. Are the children being fed properly? Are they being physically/sexually harmed? I've unfortunately had to intervene in a situation with my niece that involved the above 3.
The parenting method in the OP may not be ideal, but plenty of people have had childhoods like that
My mom grew up moving every 5-8 months, her dad was a contractor for the TVA. There are still people who follow around contracting work. Please don't minimize that actual harm caused by child abuse by cheapening the term.
While one is undoubtedly worse than the other, I don’t think it’s a good idea to say it’s not abuse because it’s not as bad as the worst possible variety.
I happen to agree this probably doesn’t rise to the level of child abuse, but there’s a large range between there and unfed/physically/sexually harmed.
We shouldn’t cheapen it, but we shouldn’t make it too expensive either.
You’re right. But this is decidedly not abuse; it’s a parenting style that many are unaccustomed to, and perhaps doesn’t work as well in the US, I have no idea.
But it’s not abuse.
You’re correct that physical/sexual harm and malnutrition are not the only things that constitute abuse either, though.
Humans have been nomads for most of our existence. I think if the traveling group had been larger so that there were consistent friendships of various ages that it might have gone differently. Carnival workers are a modern example in NA, they have traveling homeschools as they go to each ren-fair or whatever. So there are permanent friends, but the structure is pretty lacking.
Yes I know a woman who grew up this way, moving every couple of years, nothing ever permanent. As an adult, she has lived a life of self-sabotage, quitting jobs, moving and starting over, in and out of relationships with self-destructive men, never saving any money, never really planning for the future.
My family moved nearly every year (and sometimes twice a year) until I was in high school. I loved the changes. I liked that when I went someplace new, the only thing my peers knew about me was what I told them. I made many friends over the years and I’d like to think that I am happy. So YMMV.
This is correlation. Plenty of people are brought up this way and are completely fine, and plenty of people are just like this and stayed in one place their entire lives.
I know a woman who grew up in the typical way, in a stable loving household. As an adult, she has lived a life of self-sabotage, quitting jobs, moving and starting over, in and out of relationships with self-destructive men, never saving any money, never really planning for the future.
I mean, the adult life you describe doesn't sound different from my brother, and growing up we moved once.
Edit: my brother grew up into a child abusing POS by neglecting his kids, but let's looks at statistics VS anecdotes since individuals from all backgrounds can be garbage people.
This is not child abuse. It’s an anecdote of two kids. I’m sure the parents were very loving. Another pair of kids could turn out perfectly fine doing this.
In the above scenario, they were depriving their kids of any kind of meaningful friendship with peers during a critical development period. This is neglect, and neglect is abuse in children. If you care about your children, why would you risk permanently impairing their ability to form healthy relationships?
I'm not sure the average school peers are any better. Unless we're talking private education. Do consider that for the better part of history, even in school, kids were not separated into years.
That they need permanency, sure but that's the parents and the living situation
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
Socializing kids is about actual interactions with other kids. Something that nomadic life takes away from them.
In many cases they simply dont have any friends at all.
Or are always the incomers.
Of course you can live in a place with lots of kids of your own age and still be lonly, or the kids can be dicks, but in my opinion there is benefit in socialization at age 4-10.
Kids could go out ans play together. The nomads cant.
IMO permanent group of friends and place, repetition, predictability are a foundation for growth. Then you can sprinkle one off things on top.
Not a life of unpredictable mess when you are on your own.
Also if you dont speak the local language how can one even socialize
Look, I get you may have a bad experience with loneliness growing up, but this doesn't generalise. Lots of us grew up traveling for one reason or another (RVs, sailboats, military/diplomatic kids, etc), and I'd say on average we're about as well-adjusted as the kids whole spent their whole childhood in one of the various school systems around the US
I would say don't be the guy judging another parent, or another anyone, for simply living their own life differently than you happened to choose to live yours. A different lifestyle isn't child abuse. Get over yourself.
We moved a lot as kids due to my dads jobs. It was nothing you can point at and call call crazy like living in a rv, just normal jobs like a million people have to deal with, yet has essentially the same effect as your nomad rv story. Some time in the air force followed by different electronics and computer engineering jobs that just resulted in a significant move every couple of years.
Depending on my mood I can say I didn't make a lot of friends or that I made exactly normal friends, and that any weirdness about me was caused by that, or was my own nature and that didn't change anything. I can think of argumants that sound reasonable both ways, and I can cite various facts (things about me, events and outcomes in my life, etc, and the same about others with different events and outcomes) that support both ways.
Which means what I choose to say or blame says more about me than anything else.
Every thing you can say about stability I can say something equal about conformity.
Shouldn't something that unavoidably severe show up pretty clearly at a population level for military kids? I'd think there'd be some high-profile lawsuits by now.
Military kids hang out with other military kids for protracted periods (6+ months). Living in an ev in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language is different.
I mean, 'military brat' is definitely a stereotype. I'm not a sociologist so not familiar with relevant research, but I would be shocked if it hadn't been studied.
One thing I would point out is that military kids are in a far different scenario than the OP's cousins kids. Military kids will grow up moving from base to base, but the schools around bases are fundamentally different. Those are schools where teachers are used to student turnover, and the students are as well. OP talked about kids that were in a more nomadic situation, where they could only form brief <1mo friendships. The local culture of these communities is also used to and adapted somewhat to this.
That sounds like childhood trauma to me, the closest analog might not be military children but the foster care system. Not a 100% analog, since presumably the OP's cousins kids didn't have the pre-existing trauma that entry into that system necessitates, but that is the closest conventional analog I can think of. Moving around constantly into communities that aren't necessarily set up to deal with that is rough.
My mom was a navy brat in the 60's and 70's and she didn't like moving all the time, but has said that having a bunch of other families right next door all with little kids and stay at home moms actually made for a pretty great childhood.
I think it depends on the children and duration. 5 years might have been too long -- you start getting to age 10-12 stable friends become more important. But I know plenty of people who did it for a couple of years with kids - homeschooling - and it was a great opportunity for them.
Our neighbors a few years back had spent years living on a boat with their child up until age 6, I think it was, and it was great. And their daughter had a very positive experience. But yeah, once she was older they moved onshore.
I don't think moving itself has a negative effect. If you stay long enough for your kids to establish friendships, sometimes those friendships can remain when you move. My 8 year old boy still plays almost daily online + FaceTime with his friend from 1st grade in another city even though they were only a year together they established a bond that is very strong years later and they haven't seen each other. They're still best friends.
What does issues with relationships mean in this context?
Also, it sounds like they were traveling for 5 years? Yeah, that does sound like a very long time - I imagine if it had been 1 year or so it might have been a very different story (?)
It was not good.
I cannot stress enough how bad of an idea this is unless your children are under 3. Children need structure and permanency. They need friends, not just acquaintances. My cousin did everything else right, but his kids still have issues with relationships because 5 of their very formative years were spent without actual friends. It's really sad to think about.
For him, it was a wildly selfish move that negatively impacted his children. Don't be that guy.