Preparing Your Kids For the Move

My four-year-old son Alex was always quite proud of his bedroom in upstate New York. Whenever we'd have visitors, before they could even remove their coats, he'd ask, "Wanna come see my room?"

We weren't sure how he would take the idea of getting a new room in France once we made the move. So to make the transition a little easier, we sent a few small things there ahead of time with my husband Bernard. We were fortunate that Bernard was traveling before us to get things settled. When Alex first saw his new room, Daddy already had it furnished with a new "big, big boy bed" (a twin) and a few stuffed animals whom Alex had given special permission to make the trip in Daddy's suitcase. Alex's old decals of Thomas the Tank Engine, Pooh, and Eeyore adorned his walls. He seemed to forget immediately about his room in Niskayuna.

Of course, getting a new room is just one small change in the big picture of making a transcontinental move. The rest of the experience was far more complicated. Though he has been hearing French all his life from my husband, making the switch from English to French as his primary language was an obvious stress for him. But the biggest stumbling block? Getting him adjusted to his new school. In New York, he loved preschool so much; he could not wait to get out our front door and into that classroom. Here, he still puts on the brakes many mornings.

Hindsight is always 20/20. There are a few simple things I wish I'd done, and that I would do next time, if we were to face another move:

Get a picture of his new school, and if possible of his teacher and classmates. School, to him, only meant one classroom, one teacher, and one group of friends.

Find a parent and child in his class who would communicate with him prior to the move. E-mail offers so much great potential!

Ask his teacher about coming on a day prior to his enrollment to introduce him to the class. Let him play for a few minutes, but not leave him for the day.

Bring one or two special items for him to show his new classmates. Perhaps his old preschool book from the United States would have been a good choice.

For a while, we put him in school just for the mornings. Going from five hours of preschool a week to 27 hours of French maternelle per week took a huge toll on his energy levels; he responded by becoming overly aggressive. His teacher suggested we choose mornings, since more important material is covered then in her class. He returned to taking two-hour naps in the afternoons; and his behavior improved. The one-hour school nap (maximum) he'd been taking was just not sufficient. Now, after two months of part-time school, we are adding back many afternoon school sessions to his schedule.

Another major adjustment has been missing friends and relatives. Again, e-mail is a wonderful tool for us. Before we left New York, I sent home a note to his preschool classmates with our new snail mail and e-mail addresses. Thanks to this note, he corresponds from time to time with a little girl, Bianca, from the class. He's told her about the trips we've made and she tells him what's new in her life. Occasionally, we send her postcards of the places we visit or character e-mail cards from sites like http://www.pbskids.org/. We've also called a few of the boys in his former playgroup. When he tells me he misses someone, I remind him that we can always e-mail or call someone we are thinking about, and that he should focus on the happy memories he has of that person.

Over time, I've heard fewer and fewer complaints; there have been fewer times that I hear him crying in his room, "I miss my friends." (This broke my heart.) We've started a simple new tradition to help him think about the good things in our life: each night at bath time, I ask him what was the best thing about the day. His most typical response: "Feeding the goats," or if we visited a local animal park, "Feeding the pigs." I remind him that we didn't have goats or pigs to feed our stale bread in our old neighborhood, and that he didn't get to go to the Francas, our town's vacation/afterschool program.

I've also started telling him a series of stories I've made up about "Adam," a four-year-old boy who used to live in New York, but who now lives in France. Through these stories, I have crafted lessons for him about handling new situations. He often asks me to tell these same stories over and over before bed.

Finally, perhaps the most obvious strategies we used to getting him prepared was to set him up with a large variety of French books, cassettes, videotapes, and even computer games long before our move. We were fortunate to have a multi-format VCR that plays the French video format (SECAM), so we brought some cassette tapes from France of such characters as Bob the Builder and Babar, whom he already knew from the United States. Although it was difficult to find many French children's books in the United States, we stocked up during a trip to Montreal one spring; we found a used bookstore there as well as a Wal-Mart. We also bought plenty on each trip we made to France in the years before our move.

It wasn't easy at first, making such a huge adjustment from upstate New York to northeastern France, even with all the years of planning and thinking we put into this process. But now I can say with relief that after four full months of living here, Alex is back to being his old happy self. And now that we've started making friends in the area, he has picked up his former habit of nearly knocking people over when they arrive for a visit. "Tu veux voir ma chambre?" he'll ask. ("Wanna come see my room?")