Podcasts

YR via RSS

For Educators
Teach Youth Radio
Curriculum

Youth Programs
CORE
Outreach

Nomads

Moving and the effect it has on teens

Listen to this Commentary!

By The Fall 2002 Bridge Class

Adults always say teenagers need stability in their lives. To make it through school and develop “maturity,” they say youth need routine. But the truth is, many teens are forced to leave their old routine and move to a place where they have to start over and plant new roots. The Fall 2002 Bridge Class has the story.

Sarah: From what I can remember I’ve moved about nine times…

Sarah Richardson went to three different high schools her freshman year alone, and she’s not done moving yet. She’s now a junior and is getting ready to move from her group home in Hayward to another group home closer to her current high school in Berkeley.

Sarah: Since I’ve moved around so much, it’s hard for me to attach to people because you know, I think I’m going to move soon, so what’s the point of really trying to get close to people? And I always question if people are really my friends or if it’s just because they feel sorry for me.

Sarah says moving has made her stronger, but hasn’t been an easy road. All the upheaval has shaped her personality and how she interacts with others in a big way.

Sarah: I think I’m more distant because… people always say, yeah, we’re going to keep in touch and we’re going to be friends forever, but no one ever does. And so I just, I don’t depend on anyone.

I can relate. I’ve lived in eight different houses in five different towns. My last move, from Lake Oswego, Oregon to Berkeley, California was especially traumatic. I felt like I didn’t have a friend in the world. I started failing tests in school and I cried myself to sleep every night. Alan Stein is the executive director of the West Coast Children’s Clinic and says that what happened to me isn’t so unusual.

Alan Stein: When you take a child out of their social support network … if the child or the youth has underlying mental health problems… those underlying issues… can become aggravated.

We already feel so many stresses in our life from college pressure to homework to family arguments… the last thing we want is to be taken out of our comfort zone. But as hard as my last move was, it got better over time. We’re stronger than most adults give us credit for. Alan Stein agrees.

Alan Stein: It’s a commonly held myth…that kids are kind of fragile and we need to protect kids and make sure that stressful things don’t happen to them… kids have a tremendous amount of resiliency — an internal capacity to deal with change, even very stressful change.

Mac: The beginning of my freshmen year of high school I moved from Berkeley to Raleigh, North Carolina, lived there for two years… and then moved back junior year, back to Berkeley.

Mac Lingo is now a senior at Berkeley High, but since he’s only been there for a little over a year, he hasn’t really had a typical high school experience. Mac had to return to his social scene basically a stranger.

Mac: The group of friends I had almost expected to naturally to fall into — just my old group there — they had broken up and were a bunch of different people and it didn’t work like I thought it was… by the time you’re in the junior year people really find out who they are and it’s not who they were in middle school.

Now that Mac is graduating and thinking about college, he knows he’ll have to do the whole “making new friends” thing all over again. But this time, he says, he knows himself better, so he’s not too worried about adapting to a new situation.

Mac: When you’re done with the experience of moving — when you’re settled down or moved back, I think you’ll look back on it and be like, any hardships you experienced, in the end probably almost always will help you grow in some ways and help you understand yourself.

So maybe moving is one of those “character building” experiences, like failing an exam or having your heart broken. It’s no fun to go through, but surviving just might bring you one step closer to feeling like an adult.

For Youth Radio, I’m Emily Greenwell.

— This piece was produced by the Youth Radio All Stars: Kalynn Hunter, Mike Oseroff, Lauryn Silverman, Sarah Richardson, Charlotte Silver, and Ben Williams.