3 Tips to Help Your Children Cope with Moving Day
Moving home is supposed to be an exciting time for everyone involved and offers the chance to look ahead and plan how to settle in a new neighborhood. However, the reality of packing up and moving your family to a new location be a difficult time, especially if you have children.
While children are often enthralled by the idea of adventure, moving day can be extremely difficult on them, which can make the entire process particularly difficult. Therefore, it's important you take steps to cope with this.
Understand Their Stress
Moving home is inevitably going to be a stressful time as you try your best to ensure the relocation goes ahead without a hiccup. Not only can moving home be physically stressful—it isn't easy to move heavy boxes long distances—but it can also cause a great deal of emotional stress. With children, it is often the emotional stress that is the most difficult to handle.
The main driver behind a child's emotional stress when moving home is leaving a familiar environment. This is especially true if you are moving long distance and your child has to leave school and the neighborhood they grew up in. Generally, this varies with age—the longer your children have been in their current home, the more difficult it will be when they leave.
Keep Your Children Calm
The key to handling your kids when it comes to moving home is to communicate clearly with them. Help them to understand the reasons that your family is moving home and how things are going to proceed on moving day. You have to tread a very thin line with this—you don't want to lie to your children, but you want to make sure you only give them positive messages about the new area. This will help get them excited and suppress their nerves as moving day approaches.
The best way to keep your kids excited on the run up to moving day is to frame the entire thing as an adventure. Use vivid language to excite their imagination and stop them dwelling on the negatives. Instead of sitting them down and telling them why the move is a good thing for your family, try to add some color to the process by inventing games and stories as you go along.
Help Them Cope with Moving Day
Regardless of your preparation, moving day is going to be difficult. Simply put, nothing can prepare you or your children for when the move comes around. However, your children will be looking to you for guidance and it's important that you remain calm and positive in order to alleviate their concerns. If you believe that you are going to have difficulties in coping with moving day, you should consider sending your kids to a relatives.
If you do choose to send your children to a relative's for some time, you shouldn't see this as an easy get out. Rather, you still need to give your child the respect they deserve and give them a chance to say their goodbyes. This means setting aside time to take the round the neighborhood one last time. Also, letting them spend some time in the house on the morning of the move will help relieve some of their stress.
Moving is stressful, not only for your kids, but also on your as well. To help alleviate this, you should consider using local moving services. These experienced professionals will handle everything from packing your belongings to transporting the boxes to your new home. This gives you a chance to focus on your children and make sure they are coping with the relocation.
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