Guest Post
by Dr. Kyle Pruett, M.D.
For all their enormous passion to explore, invent and challenge the world order, children are basically a pretty conservative crowd. They love their creature comforts: dog-eared books, macaroni, and juice. This is why life’s transitions are more an annoyance than a welcome change to children. For many toddlers, moving furniture around in their room is all it takes to alter their sleep for a few weeks. And their move from crib to bed takes coordination and patience worthy of a corporate merger. Some of life’s inevitable transitions include moving and travel:
Moving
A move is an adult-imposed and radical change in a child’s world order and they rarely embrace it. Kids lose familiarity, meaningful stuff and places, and competence in doing the familiar in the usual places with ease and predictability.
- Prepare far ahead, and have a goodbye party.
- Accept grumpy resistance and regression – it’s not their idea, they’re entitled to complain.
- Keep familiar treasures with you and move their room in first.
- Stay in touch with your old neighborhood if your child is old enough to have established connections.
Travel
Travel is more necessary than ever for job security. Prepare to hate it – just about everyone does, including the kids. How many of us have learned to deal with a cold shoulder (temporarily) upon our safe return?
- Answer the ‘why’ you have to go as simply as possible and don’t minimize the time away to ‘ease’ your absence. It strains trust all around.
- Mark the days on a calendar for preschoolers and show them your destination on a map.
- Do NOT sneak out – it robs children the chance to cope or cry with your help.
- Make a ritual of phone calls, even when children have little to say. Remember: you left them and it is your responsibility to hold the relationship together.
Try your best not to travel around special family events such as holidays, birthdays and important school events. And when you return home, be home – stay off the phone or computer, and get down on the floor with your kids and stay there till they get up and leave you. They will eventually understand why you travel. But for now, it’s up to you to prove that you’ll always come home.
Kyle D. Pruett, M.D. is an advisor for The Goddard School®. Dr. Pruett is an authority on child development who has been practicing child and family psychiatry for over twenty-five years. He is a clinical professor of child psychiatry at Yale University’s Child Study Center.
