This was just normal on both sides of my family. My mother\’s sister was an au-pair in Moscow. She married a man who works importing and exporting hides, speaks several languages and has traveled all over the world for work. The moved a number of times and lived in Holland for a year with their 3 kids. Two of my father\’s three siblings lived outside the US. My grandmother relocated to Florence, Italy in her 50\’s and lived the rest of her life there.

After I left home I lived in Switzerland for a bit over a year and worked as an au-pair, then in college I interned in a chemical lab in Switzerland. My husband was a missionary in Korea and it was a huge shock since his family is not even remotely nomadic. I think it was to prepare him to marry me. Since we have been married he followed me to my internship and later we moved with our 3 kids to Mexico. We consider lreaning a foreign language essential to our educations and we try to help out members here who are from other countries as we were helped out. It can really help to explain cultural differences so people understand what is going on. Much of what we assume is obvious is not.

I have come to deeply value people who put down roots. There is a reason we are all different. Movement brings in new ideas and ways of doing things. People who stay put provide stability to their communities. For me moving around has been like a calling and doing what Heavenly Father wants me to do is the goal, not trying to live by someone\’s abstract ideal. We integrate into communities and learn the local language. If others do not they will simply be part of another community, both are valuable. Here we have a Spanish ward in our stake, plus we have many Hispanics who attend our English speaking wards. Both are valuable.

Moving can be extremely stressful and draining. We need to understand that each of us has different capacities and some people just integrate less than others.

There is no question at all that the times I moved after joining the church were far easier than before. English speaking or not the support system has been extremely valuable.

Amira, I was lucky to find a wife who had a similar experience. We generally “get the feeling” at about the same time. We chose a company that moves it’s professionals regularly, so employment is structured into the equation (hence the affluence). We generally know well in advance that we will be somewhere for a defined period of time. We have never just packed up and left in the dead of night (though this would describe a lot of my mother’s youth). Work also provides a community supplemental to the Church, we know people on nearly every continent who would loan us their home or the like.

I don’t discount the benefits of deep roots or “I tend to believe that living and raising a family in stable, local, close-knit, egalitarian environment.” (well except for the socialist undertone to the egalitarian term).

Our current ward is very much that way, we joke that you can’t move your records in until one of your kids has married into the core extended family.

It isn’t that we don’t see multi-generational families who a geographically close and say “oh, that really looks nice” But neither of our sets of parents live in places where we grew up, none of siblings live in the same state or country. We are well into adulthood, parenthood and our marriage and “settling in” is as foreign to us as I supposed “selling the homestead and joining the carnival” would be to a 5th generation whatever. The moving habit is much more compelling for us the the need to nest.

Of course, we miss something, but there is also an amazing abundance that is missed from the homesteader who ventures out once and then goes back with the “been there done that, glad to be back home” attitude.

I guess what I am saying is that the need for geographic/community roots is not as universal as those who feel the need to have them assume.

Russell, what am I missing?

I don’t advocate moving a family around often just because the parents can’t settle in or because there’s always a new job that looks more interesting. There’s probably not a lot of continuity in that. But I don’t think Jim Toronto is advocating that- I think he just wants more families to be open to living overseas. I think it is beneficial is for families to spend some time overseas at some point- maybe a few months, maybe a year, and in a few cases, maybe more than that. Even just a summer building houses in South America or Asia with your teenage kids is likely to be a very good experience for the entire family, and well, if it isn’t, it was just 3 months.

I also think it’s interesting that this conversation has focused on the experiences of children instead of the trailing spouses who often have as little choice in the move as the children. In fact, I’ve seen more unhappy spouses, especially wives, than children.

If the problem here is against one-size-fits-everyone lifestyles and recommendations, such as the one Ardis reacted to at the end of Toronto’s article, then I have to agree. But I resist the thoroughly modern assumption that “nothing’s normal,” that there isn’t any kind of generally preferred way of living, even if there are plenty of exceptions out there. Obviously, given my political and economic commitments, I tend to believe that living and raising a family in stable, local, close-knit, egalitarian environments is best. That’s I contestable belief, I’ll admit. And I guess I also have to admit that there are many ways of living overseas, in foreign countries and culture, which nonetheless allow for those sorts environments to emerge. And maybe I’m wrong to assume that there’s some sort of age limit, past which there just won’t be the time for such environments to envelope growing children. (Norbert makes a good point that a lot of international institutions are attuned to this need, and have set things up so that the children of nomads need not invariably end up living in a fairly narrow, wholly expatriated, disconnected social world.) So yeah, there are more qualifications to be made to my original judgment.

Still, all things considered, being a true nomad–someone who’ll take a new job and head out to some distant place for the adventure of it–strikes me as missing something. Just consider me at least part hobbit, I guess.

big and small cities overseas and in the US.

Are we successful? But most measures. People tell us our kids are well adjusted, we both have served missions and have multiple degrees, we can drive a manual transmission from either side of the car. We purchased a home, but when we did we bought one we could afford to keep, even if we don’t live in it.

Have we benefited from the Church absolutely. We attend where ever we are. Seems like I get drastically different callings each time, my wife gets pretty much the same one each time. We enjoy looking for the regional differences in Mormon culture. Other than my wife’s undergraduate at BYU, neither of us have ever lived in Utah, the biggest culture shock is when we attend Church in the Mormon cultural area. My first time to Utah was the MTC, it was really, really weird. We can almost always do the three-degrees-of-separation thing anywhere in the Church.

When we consider the disadvantages, there is a financial cost that is inherent in moving, currency exchange and a few other things, but in our opinion it is worth it.

We don’t really consider an alternative. We have tried a few times and it doesn’t work. After so long in a place it is time to go, it just is.

We moved as kids. Of the seven kids in my family, only two attended high school together in the same school.

My adult life has been more of the same. Both before and after getting married. My wife grew up in a similar situation. It was for many different “reason,” employment, education, military, just because. But the truth is that decisions were probably based on the need to “move on.” Our current career choices mean that it will continue indefinitely (on purpose).

It is only recently that we transitioned from “doing it on the cheap” to what might be considered a small amount of affluence (car rentals, money for souvenirs, squeezing in an extra side trip by plane, or sleeping in a hotel instead of “urban camping” in the airport or the car).

Our housing decisions are made based on the next move. Our furniture doesn’t last nearly as long as it should. Our dogs have been in 5 airports so far this year. Some of our mail shows up with 3 + 4 address change labels affixed. Our daughter’s first solids were in Europe, her first time in the ocean was in Africa, she is world weary about planes but for some reason riding the bus is the biggest thrill. We have alarm clocks with three different types of plugs (an new alarm clock is cheaper than a new plug adapter). My wife’s cell phone area code is from two moves ago.

We still have friends from when we were in elementary school. I was best man for a friends wedding from high school, I went with with Them to the courthouse to get their marriage license (in that state a witness is required), I had to state how long I had known them, I had been friends with the husband for 14 years, the wife 7. My wife has a similar collection of long term friends.

The whole idea of “putting down roots” sounds nice, but in practice it doesn’t work. After about two years the feet start to itch, boredom sets in, we’ve tried all the restaurants and been to all the attractions. We get restless and stir crazy. We have seen the extremes, small mountain west towns

Because you were moving around within North America, the schools probably didn’t really monitor the progress of transcient students or have any programs for helping with transitions. (Not making it possible for a move-in to be in the band seems ridiculous, IMO.) Good international schools deal with these issues up front because they have to — we have a turnover of about 30% of our students and teachers every year. But like you said, some kids thrive and others do not. We do a survey of students every year, and one of the questions we ask is whether they would choose to live the nomadic /expat / diplomatic life their parents do, and it’s about 50/50.

James Toronto ended his BYU Studies article with this statement: “I am convinced that individual members, the family as a unit, and the Church as a whole would be greatly blessed if every family could experience firsthand the blessings and challenges of being ‘strangers in a strange land.’”

That unqualified enthusiasm, that prescription for universal consumption, seems very wrong to me. It doesn’t allow for the possibility of differences between individuals. To me, blanket statements like that are “not normal.” If it works for you, if your children are strong enough to tolerate it, I’m in your cheering section. I simply don’t think it’s right to state a one-sided proposition without consideration of the possible serious consequences for some personalities.

I think most parents do the best they can and it’s pretty difficult to assign guilt for a child’s problems solely on the decisions of the parents. It’s impossible to say that an unhappy expat kid would have been fine if she’d lived in the same city in the US all her life. But I see this argument a lot- that you shouldn’t live overseas, or homeschool, or live on a farm, or whatever because it’s not normal and good for kids.