Preparing Your Children for a Major Move

I am a military wife. That phrase means different things to different people. To some, it simply means, “spouse”. For others, whose husbands’ jobs consume every waking hour and many of their sleeping hours, it means a great deal more. My husband is away from home for five days and nights out of every ten. The title of “Military Wife” means that I manage all aspects of our household and am the primary caregiver for our child. In military families, children can very easily become lost in the shuffle and their unique needs are sometimes forgotten in the rush of other important duties and responsibilities.

Moving is a very large part of military life, albeit smaller now than it was before so many Clinton era budget cuts, but nevertheless a very large part of our lives. Too often, the military member and their spouse get caught up in the logistical details of their moves to remember that their children have very special needs at these crucial times. I once was in the Commissary rest room, changing my son’s diaper, when a woman came in with two completely inconsolable children. It seems they had just arrived in Montana from a four-year assignment in Japan and the children wanted to “go home” to Japan. The freezing winds and deep snows that greeted them when they arrived in Montana were completely unexpected and less than welcoming to the children that only knew the temperate weather of a Pacific island all their lives. Unfortunately, their parents hadn’t prepared them for the move physically or psychologically. The poor children didn’t even have hats to cover their poor freezing little ears! This is a case of a family being ill prepared for a move and, unfortunately, it happens more often than it should. Following are a few important things that you should remember about preparing your children for a major change of residence.

Learn About Where You Are Going

The first step is for parents to become as familiar as possible with their new assignment prior to moving there. As soon as you find out that you’ll be moving, make use of every moment you have in your current home to learn about your new home. You can’t prepare for everything, but being as prepared as possible will help you to manage any surprises that pop up along the way. Find out everything you can about the climate of your new home. Should you expect rain, snow, storms, or unusually high or low temperatures when you arrive there? What will your housing situation be when you arrive? Will you be moving directly into a home? Will you need to stay in a hotel while you shop for a home to rent or purchase? Will your children be on summer vacation from school or will they be transferring into a new school mid-year? Will they be meeting a new day care provider? Where will they be spending their time? Do they have any friends that already live where you’ll be moving? Does either you or your spouse have friends there with children close to your own child’s age?

Find the Good Points to Get Excited About

You may not be excited about the snowy winters in Colorado, but if you concentrate on positive points like learning to ski, making snowmen, snow days or tobogganing, you and your children may just be able to get excited about it. In fact, you should turn as many things as possible into positives. This is where Mom and Dad become “Spin Doctors”. If you’ll be staying in a hotel temporarily, turn this into a good thing. Help your children to see it as a big adventure. Find out if their favorite restaurant is nearby and promise to take them to it for dinner or find out about nearby restaurants that deliver and get your kids excited about that. (Just remember to always follow up on the promises you make to your children. Moving is a very stressful time for them and they don’t need the disappointment of broken promises on top of that.) Will you be moving away from close friends and/or family? Help your children prepare their own address books so that they can write to friends and family. You could even buy them their own stationery and stamps to facilitate this. (Explaining to friends and family how important return correspondence to your children will be will also be an important thing for you to do. You may even consider buying them stamps as well!) Modern technology can help here a great deal. Email is inexpensive and used by many Americans and most public and military libraries have computers available for public use. Modern cellular phone plans have very flexible calling plans and most offer free night and weekend calling. Allowing your children to call their friends and missed family members regularly will also help them with the separation. If you have friends or family near the area you’ll be moving to, consider helping your children to establish closer relationships with them before the move by writing letters or emails, or talking on the telephone.

Learn the bad points and help your children prepare in a positive way

Of course it can’t all be positive or spun toward the positive. This is where your attitude and expressed emotions will be very important. By approaching and encouraging your children to approach the negative points in a positive manner, you will help both yourself and your children adjust quickly to the new environment. Remember that children look first to their parents for cues on how they should react. If you do nothing but complain about the place you’ll be moving too, your children will pick up on it very quickly and they’ll begin to dread the move simply because you do and they’ll build up far more emotional stress than necessary. Let us not forget that if your children are stressed out, you will certainly be suffering from the effect of it soon.

Equipment Issue

When military personnel arrive at a new base, they receive equipment that they’ll need for their work at that particular base. If they are arriving at a base that has particularly cold weather, they receive special issue of long underwear, coats, caps, gloves and other cold weather gear. The same sort of thing occurs at warm weather bases except they receive special warm weather supplies like sunglasses, dust goggles, hats and other appropriate items. Why not consider doing the same sort of thing for your children with child appropriate items? Having them help you pick out special gear for them to use at their new home will help them to get excited about the move. Purchasing things like footwear, hats, sunglasses, clothing and climate appropriate toys can help your children to focus on the fun they’ll have once they get there rather than what or whom they might be leaving behind.

Moving is always a very stressful time for adults, but it is even more stressful for children. Don’t let your children get lost in the shuffle by forgetting their special needs at this important time in their lives. Although you may have a list of many other very important duties and responsibilities, don’t forget that your children should always be at the top of that list. Moving can be very disruptive to a child’s life and cause them a great deal of stress. The way you approach this momentous event and the attitudes you and your spouse have toward it will have a direct effect on whether your children deal with it positively or negatively.