Immigration for 2 year olds.

[TheTeaLady]

Hello,
We are about to move very, very far away.
For good.
We've started telling our almost-2 year old we're moving house, going on a plane, etc and have been discussing with her a photo of our new house, talking about the garden there, how we will live near nana and so on.
How do we explain that she won't see her little friends again?
Do we explain it at all?
We're a bit confused about how much to explain don't want to overload her but at the same time, don't want her to arrive in the Antipodes without any inkling of what we're doing there.
She only knows her grandparents from Skype and has no other little buddies (yet) over there. She loves her wee playmates here :-(
Any thoughts appreciated.

The average child doesn't tend to remember anything before the age of 3 years old. Therefore doing any explaining specifically thinking your child will understand any move is to me a bit pointless. Surely it's all about being relaxed, talking about moving because it's just normal conversation. Going as far as explaining to a 2 year old they won't see their friends again is really not going to mean a thing.

I would say, don't worry for the reasons natation says. They dont really have a concept of distance/ being in a different country etc. I dont think they even realise the plane is moving- they're just annoyed at having to sit still for 5 mins. We just moved at the weekend (within the same city admittedly ) and DS (20mo) appears to have no curiosity whatsoever about why we suddenly live somewhere else and where the other house has gone.

Similarly, he loves seeing his friends when he sees them, but I'm not sure he anticipates it, or wonders when it will happen again. A friend recently left HK and went home, and he's never looked for her son at playgroup even tyhough they played together a lot. You'll probably find she doesnt even ask about her friends.

We move every 2 years with my job and it is only this move that DD expressed that she missed certain friends (not the ones we were expecting her to miss) she was 5 last move

We have just returned from our annual trip back to the UK and this is the first time DS has said he misses his GPs and that he doesn't like living so far away from them . He's 3.8.

Agree with everyone else. DD only expressed displeasure at moving when she was six. She'd already done two countries by then without stress or trauma.

My daughter was 3 years 8 months and my son was 20 months when we moved to New Zealand (so about as far as you can move!) at the beginning of January. Neither of them have had any trouble settling here, and accept it completely as their home now. My son didn't notice anything had changed really, he was just happy to have his toy monkey and fire engine still! At that age, as long as they've still got their mummy and daddy with them they don't really care about anything else! My 3 year old (now 4) loves it here, talks about her friends a bit, but doesn't want to go back.
My advice would be to meet up with other mums as soon as you can, explore and just have a fun time as a family! My mum just visited for 2 weeks and I was worried how the kids would react when she went back, but they've not been upset by that either - we skype family and they seem to be happy with that. Despite all the change (I have a 5 week old baby now too!!!), they have not been unhappy at all, and I think it is the perfect age to move. Good luck with it all, and enjoy it!

Second what everyone else says we moved When DD was 2 and she was fine, barely registered the change! She talks about friends from home sometimes if we look at their pictures but doesn't really miss them at all..

Phew- glad the consensus seems to be with me. Did have slight doubts that maybe DS is just a bit thick

Actually I disagree. My DD was 2.2 when we moved abroad and she was utterly flummoxed by it. We hadn't spelled out to her that we were moving countries etc but of course she sensed something was afoot, even though we were't emptying our house in our home country as it was a shortish term placement abroad.

When we got to the destination, she was very homesick and was ecstatic to return 'home' for our first Christmas. Yes she did settle in time but bizarre things upset her e.g. we live in a tiny village in a rural backwater where the church bells ring all day long. Our new town was an industrial dump and had none of that and she used to cry if she heard church bells on a audio book she has.

Of course her unexpected reaction could be to do with the fact with moved from an idyllic life here with lots of children's activities to a shithole with eff all for kids to do and it was hard for her to find pals and I really had to work very hard at finding people for both of us to socialise with! (Atypical expat setting admittedly).

Good luck. I did not expect her to react as she did and it broke my heart to see my cheery little two year old so visibly homesick. Fast forward to now and we have just returned 'home' and she is ecstatic to be back. She had really acclimatised there, spoke the lingo very very well and had friends etc but in her heart this was always home.

DD was 18 months when we moved to her 4th home, 2nd country. I stupidly thought she was too young to be affected, i was more concerned about the dog settling in (9th home, 4th country for him) than i was my little toddler.

The move had a big affect on her. She regressed with her sleeping, feeding and speech progress. She found it incredibly hard to integrate and my confident happy toddler became a shy and quiet recluse. A year later she still plays on her own at nursery and hasn't quite got the two languages thing. Luckily we have other expat friends she plays with and seems very happy with them. I feel a fool for believing she was too young to be affected by a big move just because everybody elses kids had no problems.

DS was 20mo when we moved to Australia - but it was a bit easier for us because his Grandma was here, and we'd been out to see her the previous year, so he understood the flying thing and that Grandma lived the other side of the plane journey.

He has adapted well to being here but I'm sure having Grandma here has made a big difference to that. The only "problem" I had was that he ended up sleeping in with me again (practical issues) and I still haven't broken him of it - it's an insecurity thing at night time, but it's the only one he has - the rest of the time he's fine. He will have to learn to sleep on his own soon but so far it's not going well.

Other than that, I can't say it had that much of an adverse effect on him - but he does miss his Grandpa and cousins in the UK and asks to go and see them more often now, not quite understanding that we can't just pop over there. He's 4.5 now so his understanding is improving and he misses home when he's in the UK and misses grandpa and people and grandpa's house when he's here - funny little boy. Skype is invaluable of course - but sometimes it sets off a spate of "I want to go to Grandpa's house again". :(

DS was 2.09yrs when we moved and did really well. We used a third of our luggage allowance bringing stuff like his pillow and duvet and most favourite toys so it would smell and look a little like home when we first got here. Grammaw helped by telling him he would be able to go to the beach whenever he liked and we told him he could buy any toy he wanted when we got here because most of his toys would be taking a really slow boat here.

It did take him a while to make new friends, I quickly got him into nursery after hearing 'but grandma, I do have friends, grown up ones. No kid ones."

We kept a lot of his favourite things, he still had a bottle of milk in the morning because we thought it might help the transition and he loved to swim and so we found a house with a pool. The new house was more than double the size of our UK house and he loved to run around it. We bought him a fish because he wanted one.

We moved to Germany when my dd was 20 months - her language was quite advanced for her age and she was bothered that other children didn't understand her (other children played happily with her, probably assuming her English was baby babble - she still looked quite babyish as she was little and round without much hair ;) ). She started to pick up the language quite quickly but didn't become truly bi-lingual till she started Kindergarten the month she turned 3. However she had lots of friends and spoke German perfectly well enough to play by then, and once she got going she seemed to relish learning new words and phrases (she did consciously notice the 2 languages - I remember her commenting "Little boy says Ente but it's duck!" - whereas my son, who was born here couldn't have told you which language he was speaking and seemed not to notice there were 2 languages going on around him, until he turned 4.

DD had been going to quite a few 2nd birthday parties for the children born to my antenatal class friends, most of whom she was used to seeing several times a week, in the weeks before we left and even though she was not quite 2 this had fixed firmly in her head the idea that she would also get a turn at having a birthday party, and she was very concerned about whether her friends would be able to come to her party - we told her it was a bit too far but she would have new friends to come to her party, and I made sure we did invite every child close in age to her in the village and have a big party (even though I was 9 months pregnant, and her brother was in fact born the next day, but it was important to her and I am so glad we did).

DD did miss her friends even though she was so little, but taking her to toddlers as soon as possible (I think the second week after the move) and spending loads of time in the village playground with her helped her make new ones, and then she was fine.

Somebody else commented on sleep issues though, and even though DD seemed mostly totally happy in the day her sleep did go totally to pot - she had been a bad sleeper as a baby, til about 9 months, but had been sleeping through for almost a year by the move, but once we moved she was hard to settle at bedtime and waking lots of times a night - I ended up sleeping on her floor unti her baby brother was born.

Some of it with DD could have been the fact the move and the birth of her little brother came close together - she understood about the pregnancy and actually she relaxed and her sleep improved once he was here, so she could have been anxious about what his arrival would mean, it is hard to separate what was the move and what was the imminent arrival of a new sibling.

We did talk to DD about the move in advance, she has grandparents here and that was what we focussed on, and the fact we would be going on an aeroplane and living next door to a playground (we had to drive to get to one in the UK), before the move she seemed happy and excited about it, and overall she settled well, but I think blithely assuming "kids are adaptable" is not necessarily the best way, as some are in their own little bubble at 2 where as long as Mummy (and maybe Daddy) are there it doesn't matter where they are, but others are very tuned into what is going on around them!