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.)
