Residential Mobility during Early Adolescence and Socioemotional Development

Background and purpose: A residential move is a relatively common experience for families with children in the United States. Although research has documented a significant link between residential mobility and child development, less attention has been paid to residential moves during early adolescence and their impacts on socioemotional development. Moreover, the extant mobility research generally fails to address critical issues of selection bias in the relationship between residential mobility and children’s developmental outcomes. This study examined the effects of residential mobility during early adolescence (ages 9 to 15) on socioemotional development (age 15), and explored the extent to which these associations varied by household poverty.

Methods: This study used data from the Future Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), a longitudinal birth cohort study of children born in 1998-2000 in 20 U.S. cities. The final sample included 2,680 mothers and their children with no missing data on the focal variables (51.2% male; 49.3% non-Hispanic/Black; 31.4% married; 36.3 % low-income). At the 15-year survey, mothers reported the number of residential moves they experienced since the last interview (age 9). This variable was dichotomized using the top quartile point: high residential mobility ≥ 3 moves vs. low residential mobility < 3 moves. Adolescents’ socioemotional development at age 15 was measured with two subscales from the Child Behavior Checklist/4-18 (CBCL/ 6-18): internalizing (8 items) and externalizing (20 items) behavior problems. A dichotomous variable of household poverty was created: adolescents in poverty (< 100% of the federal poverty line) vs. adolescents in non-poverty (≥ 100% of the federal poverty line). A wide range of covariates from adolescent, mother, household, and neighborhood characteristics was included in all analyses. This study employed inverse-probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) analyses in an attempt to minimize selection bias. All analyses were performed using R version 4.2.3.

Results: The IPTW analyses suggested that highly mobile adolescents were more likely to show internalizing (B = .368, SE = 0.153, p < .01) and externalizing (B = .813, SE = 0.315, p < .01) behavior problems than stable mobile adolescents. However, no evidence emerged of a moderating effect of household poverty on the relationship between residential mobility and socioemotional development. These findings remained robust in sensitivity analyses where alternative cut-off thresholds were used.

Conclusions and implications: Even after adjusting for preexisting differences between high- and low-mobility adolescents, experiencing frequent residential relocations during early adolescence was negatively associated with adolescents’ socioemotional development. These findings align with bioecological theory, the family stress model, and social capital theory. They underscore the need of policy and practice actions that support highly mobile adolescents and their families or reduce the frequency of residential moves due to financial distress. Housing assistance, but also expansion of school-based interventions for frequently mobile adolescents, should be prioritized to mitigate adverse consequences of multiple moves on early adolescents’ development.