Lori Burgan - Moving with Kids: 25 Ways to Ease Your Familys Transition to a New Home

The Harvard Common Press
535 Albany Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02118
www.harvardcommonpress.com

Copyright 2007 by Lori Collins Burgan
Cover illustration copyright 2007 by Neverne Covington

Quotation on reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult
Publishing Group from One Day My Soul Just Opened Up by Iyanla Vanzant. Copyright
1998 by Inner Visions, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the pub
lisher.

Printed in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burgan, Lori Collins.
Moving with kids: 25 ways to ease your family's transition to a new home/Lori Collins
Burgan.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-55832-343-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 1-55832-342-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Moving, HouseholdPsychological aspects. 2. Child psychology. 3. Parent and child.
I. Title.
TX307.B87 2007
648'.90019dc22 2006016734

ISBN-13: 978-1-55832-342-1 (hardcover); 978-1-55832-343-8 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1-55832-342-2 (hardcover); 1-55832-343-0 (paperback)

Special bulk-order discounts are available on this and other Harvard Common Press
books. Companies and organizations may purchase books for premiums or resale, or may
arrange a custom edition, by contacting the Marketing Director at the address above.

Cover design by Night & Day Design
Interior design by Jill Winitzer
Cover illustration by Neverne Covington

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my phenomenal children, Rebecca, Sarah, and Mark, who make me thankful each day that I chose to be a parent. I admire each one of you more than you'll ever know.

To my husband, Randy, a private person who isn't totally comfortable with my sharing all our family stories in this book, but who supports my passion to do so.

To my dear friend Catherine Heaslip, who suggested that I write this book. I don't think I would have thought of it had you not planted the seed.

To Connie Williamson, Laurie Fike, Mary Olsen, Lisa Sullivan, K.C. Gullett, Debby Wadas, Roxann Ringnald, and Sherry Martinez for letting me share your stories.

Moving is a fact of American life, and children are greatly affected. Parents, relatives, families with new foster and adopted children, and other caregivers need all of the information that Lori Collins Burgan has organized. They need her hope, and her realism about the grieving process that is inherent in every major life change. They need to understand the balance between loss and gain, between reality and expectation, and the need to help children maintain connections.

The irony of my promoting this book as a family-support professional is that I moved my family oftenfirst as a military wife for ten years, and then, following my husband's death in a helicopter crash, as a widow whose career brought more moves. I wish I had been given this book when my children were young; I would have done a better job of empowering them. My grown daughter would say that she has weathered her adulthood with more hope and stability because the moves trained her to adapt. But she would also say that the moves were traumatic and painful. The moving was all that moving is: wonderful, exciting, frightening, and an opportunity to look at the world, for a time, through the filter of newness. Moving can be a way of animating the essential pioneer spirit in ourselves and in our families.

After I remarried and moved my children six times in a few years, our family landed in Evanston, Illinois, where we have been for ten years. During these seemingly stable years, I have moved four older children from orphanages in Russia to the United States and into my home, without thinking in a focused way about all of the excitement, hope, change, and grieving that the moves entailed for each child. The strength of older adopted children in facing a new culture and language on top of the loss of all that is familiar is a monument to the human spirit. Each child responds individually. One adopted daughter still grieves the loss of her best friend in a Russian orphanage. An adopted son is now "moving" to independence, and the book has illuminated the difficulty of that experience for a boy who had only a short time in a family after years of institutional living. The idea in this book of being an energy-generating parent with a sense of humor and positive expectations is absolutely key.

In recent years my older children have recounted moving stories from our past with real pleasure. They tell about a night in Tucumcari, New Mexico, during a move to Kansas, in which the wind was so strong and the weather so cold that our motel room could not be warmed. This forced the entire family into one bed, heaped with blankets and coats. Laughter, jokes, and a sense of adventure prevailed until morning arrived, with a cobalt-blue sky and a new-fallen snow covering everything within sight. Over pancakes and breakfast in a warm little restaurant, the children declared the night as having been "the most fun ever."

Most powerful in our family history of moving is the story of our first adoption, in Jamaica. Not long after my first husband's death, I decided to make new connections to life by taking two children and moving to the Caribbean. Three of us left, five of us returned, and the connections to Jamaica will never be severed.

Family Support America promotes family strength, and Moving with Kids is an important resource for families. My children have said that parents are the key to the moving experience; if the parents see the adventure and are grounded in the here and now, the children will reflect that energy in the long run. This book fosters awareness that loss is part of the moving process. It shows how information and understanding can make moving with kids a more intentional, thoughtful, creative, and joyful process. This is a book about building strength, treating each family member with respect, creating and celebrating family history, keeping in touch, and enlarging our sense of belonging to many places. The book reminds us that we should reach out to newcomers and others who move, that moving is a chance to learn and practice new skills and to develop new stories, and that electronic communications can provide new ways of promoting human connections and reducing isolation. This is a book about hope, about the movement of the human heart from one place to another, and about the paradox that we must reach out and hold on at the same time.

VIRGINIA L. MASON
President and CEO, Family Support America
Mother of Eric, Amy, Joy, Andy, David, Brittany,
Alexandra, Diana, Timur, and Albina

In writing this book, I do not claim to be an expert on how moving affects all children, nor have I conducted surveys to determine steps that everyone should take to reduce the negative impact of a move. Rather, I offer practical tips that have worked for my friends, acquaintances, and family members as we have moved around the country. Some of these tips I have garnered the hard way, through trial and error. Many I have discovered by listening to my children's ideas and dreams.

My personal experience with moving began between third and fourth grade, when my family moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Anderson, Indiana. The move entailed my transfer from a predominantly Caucasian, Jewish, upper-income school to a predominantly African-American, lower-income one, where I was one of two white children in my class. Seven years after this move, with the pain still fresh in my memory, I wrote this poem: