Thriving Little Thinkers has moved to Indiana!

My family of 5 just moved from Birmingham to Indianapolis for a work relocation. To call it a major adjustment would be an understatement. While there are exciting parts about moving to and exploring a new part of the country, these are big changes and can often show up in behavior, mindset, and even physical symptoms of stress or anxiety in our children.

What does neuroscience have to do with new beginnings?

Moving is inherently stressful for adults and kiddos alike. Stress and good thinking don’t go together.

When you are stressed your body releases hormones associated with a fight or flight response and inhibits your access to the part of the brain that does deep thinking. This makes sense–if you see a grizzly bear charging at you, it’s not the best time to stop and have a deep thinking session! No, you want your survival instincts to takeover and react quickly, often before you even realize you’ve started moving away from the threat.

Changes in environment, routine, or caregivers can cause these types of stress responses in our kids. As prepared adults, we can provide avenues to explore that discomfort and work through it so that our children gain skills for inevitable future challenges.

I’ve been utilizing brain based and budget friendly techniques for helping our kids through this transition. You can help your kids through transition too, without breaking the bank! All you need is some scratch paper, a sharpie, and some coffee.

Here are 5 brain-friendly transition tips:

1. Anticipate and recognize signs of stress. Address them as quickly as possible.

Changes in routine, their environment, and even our own stresses as parents can all contribute to a child’s stress. Don’t be surprised when you need to leave a library or park due to behavioral issues soon after a major transition (Hi! It’s me…this has happened to us multiple times in the past two weeks).

Have you ever wondered “What were they thinking?” Well, during stressful times they are NOT thinking. Stress limits our ability to inhibit impulses, think critically or solve problems. Couple that with already limited social skills and a small vocabular in a tiny body and it’s no wonder we see such behavioral issues during transition.

Model a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset. Be intentional in how you convey stressful situations to your child (or even around your child). Do you treat this transition time as the worst possible thing that has ever happened to your family? Or do you acknowledge the hard while highlighting the good? Managing your own stress will help you to assist your child.

2. Use your words with intention.

Speak honestly about what is happening, but don’t provide unnecessary details. Less words and more plain speech.

“Our things will be ride in the moving truck and we will ride in our van.”

“We will sleep in our new room tonight.”

“We are visiting our new doctor this afternoon.”

Speak positively about the move. We talked about our “big adventure” of moving and shared our excitement about exploring new places. There are great brain benefits to having adventures (Read 3 Ways That Adventures Change Our Thinking). Enthusiasm is contagious just like anxiety is contagious. Your child will likely look to you to see how to react to new things.

When our child brought up any anxieties about the move, we acknowledged them and discussed them plainly and honestly. We also provided appropriate reframing when necessary.

3. Make connections between the “old” and “new.”

“Making multiple connections is a skills that becomes possible during the later preschool and early school-age years and beyond as the prefrontal cortex of children’s brains mature. It calls on executive functions of the brain, including working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility.” Ellen Galinsky, Mind in the Making

Notice what is different and what is the same. (There is a great Daniel Tiger song for this!) As we made trips for house and apartment shopping in Indiana, we pointed out thinngs around us and asked “Different or the same?” We strongly highlighted the things that wouldn’t change such as God, His Word, and our family. And our kids were PUMPED to know that there is a Chick-fil-a because, ya know, priorities. They noticed that there were still parks, libraries, grocery stores, and houses even if they weren’t identical to the ones in Alabama.

We took this game a step further and documented some of their connections on a piece of white paper and posted in the old house and in our new apartment. This idea of taking their ideas and making them visually accessible leads to the next tip:

4. As much as possible, make things VISIBLE!

We have made three visual charts to make transition thinking visible during this moving process. We’ve made 1) a different vs. same chart, 2) a questions list, and 3) an Indiana bucket list of things we’d like to do here.

Simply taking their observations and questions and documenting them has helped eased their anxiety, given a reference point when a question is repeated, and helped my kindergartener begin to play with visual organization of ideas.

My children’s questions are not very complicated, but when unanswered they can create stress and anxiety. My five year old mentioned that she is having “lots of thoughts” about our new house and that she “keeps thinking about it all day and all night.” I asked her what the thoughts were about and it turns out she has some anxiety and worry over her place in our new house and the lack of knowledge about where it will be and what it will look like.

“Where will I sleep?” “Where will my brother sleep?” “Who will get to keep the bunk beds?”

“Will my stuff come there, too?” “Will things stay in storage?”

“Will we keep moving again and again?”

We added these questions to our chart “What ?’s do you have?” and answered the ones we could. For the questions we didn’t know the answers to, since we haven’t found a new house, we were honest and told her that we would find that out together when the time comes.

Hilariously, our three year old’s questions have been almost all about food. “Will we get Rick Krispie Treats there? Do they have Chick-fil-a there? Can we bring our oatmeal packets for breakfast?” I assured him that we will continue to feed him all the things.

Another time we prioritized visuals was when packing up their bedrooms. I asked each child to come to their room with me and explained “We are packing up your things so that they can come with us. I want you to see me put them in the boxes, and I want you to help me box them as well, so that you know where your things are going. All of the boxes will go on the truck and daddy will drive the truck to Indiana. You can keep it all, we are just sending it on the truck. Even if you can’t see it once it is packed up, it isn’t “gone.”

Simply allowing them to visually see where their things were going put them so much more at ease.

5. Introduce multiple perspectives.

Seeing multiple perspectives is a hallmark of critical thinking. And by teaching your child to consider multiple perspectives in a situation uses multiple executive functions of the brain, building up the brain’s “muscles” that make critical thinking possible.

“Perspective taking calls on many of the executive functions of the brain. It requires inhibitory control, or inhibiting our own thoughts and feelings to consider the perspectives of others; cognitive flexibility to see a situation in different ways; and reflection, or the ability to consider someone else’s thinking alongside our own.” Ellen Galinsky, Mind in the Making

My daughter asked me why someone else would want an “old home” from us (I’ve been referring to our Alabama home as the “old house” and our apartment as our “new home”.) She was taking me literally, and thought “old” was a negative term. So I explained that the house was our previous house, and that it would be “new” to the people who bought it even if it wasn’t brand new. It would be new because they haven’t experienced living in that home yet. She made the connection, and asked if there would be people moving out of our new home and that we would be moving into their “old” home? YES! Absolutely.

Takeaway

Even during times of stressful transition, parents can empower their children to think logically and critically. It can be done in everyday moments, without spending all your hard earned money.