Children Can’t Handle Change

On who adapts faster, and who gets to decide.

We had been at a campsite in Slovenia for three weeks when the time came to move on. It was one of those places where you arrive planning to stay a few days and end up staying longer than you intended. The lake, the light in the late afternoon, the quiet rhythm of the neighbors a few spots over. Noa had met a couple of girls and they spent their evenings together with a regularity that had already started to feel like a habit. On the last day, the three of them stayed out late doing something I couldn’t quite see from a distance. They exchanged something, a bracelet or a note, I don’t remember. They hugged. And when we started the van, Noa asked where we were going and how long it would take to get there. She didn’t ask if she’d see the girls again. She didn’t cry. She didn’t ask to stay. She looked at me for a moment from the back seat, smiled without much drama, and turned to watch the road through the window.

Miriam and I didn’t say anything for a while. There was something in that image that was hard to process. Not because it was sad, but because it was too calm. Too light for what we imagined it should have been. And I realized that something I had expected to be difficult for her was actually more difficult for me. The discomfort of leaving when something is already working, when there are already bonds, when there’s already a rhythm. The weight of leaving a place where you’ve felt good. That wasn’t Noa’s. It was mine.

There’s a phrase that comes up often when people find out how we live. It varies in form but the substance is always the same: “Children need stability. Constant change affects them.” Sometimes it’s said gently, as a question. Other times it comes directly, with the conviction of someone who has read something on the topic or simply internalized it as a given. And there’s enough truth in it that you can’t just wave it away. But there’s also something the phrase assumes without saying it: that children are fragile in the face of change in a specific way, that change damages them by default, and that stability, any stability, is better than movement.

What I’ve observed in Noa, across many moves and many new places, is something different. Not that change doesn’t affect her. Of course it does. Arriving somewhere new and not knowing anyone has its weight. Adapting to a different environment, different norms, a language she may not fully speak, takes energy. That’s real and there’s no point in denying it. But what’s also real is that this process of adaptation has become, through practice, something she already knows how to do. Not something that paralyzes her but something she moves through. As if she’d developed a kind of muscle that most of the adults I know don’t have, because they never needed to exercise it.

The problem, I think, is that we confuse stability with immobility. We imagine that a stable child is a child who doesn’t move, who always has the same room, the same school, the same group of friends, the same route from the front door to the park. And that can be stability, yes. But it can also be rigidity. A way of building a world so predictable that any variation in it becomes threatening. I’ve known children who grew up with that kind of stability and who fall apart when something changes, because no one taught them to change, because everything around them implicitly communicated that change was dangerous and should be avoided. The stability that protected them when they were small became a fragility when they were adults.

What’s striking is that this confusion doesn’t disappear when you move away from the conventional system. We’ve encountered it in environments that present themselves as alternatives: Waldorf schools, attachment parenting communities, conscious education groups. In the Waldorf world, for example, stability isn’t an accident of design but a philosophical principle in itself. The same teacher for eight years. The same group of children. The same seasonal rhythm, repeated year after year, as the structure that organizes and protects the child’s inner world. It’s a coherent vision with its own internal logic. But it’s also another way of elevating permanence to a condition, of turning continuity into a requirement. And when you arrive in those environments with a life like ours, the mental restrictions you encounter are different in form but recognizable at their core: your child needs a teacher who knows them over time, needs a stable reference group, needs rhythm and continuity. What changes compared to the conventional system is the aesthetics. The underlying assumption remains intact.

There’s also something else worth examining. When adults say that children can’t handle change, many of them are talking about themselves without knowing it. The change that’s uncomfortable isn’t always the child’s. It’s the adult’s, who has to reorganize their life, change their habits, leave behind what’s familiar, start over in some way. Children serve sometimes as a legitimate excuse not to do what one doesn’t want to do anyway. “We’re not moving because of the kids” is a phrase I’ve heard many times and that in many cases, if you scratched a little, would reveal something different underneath. Not because it’s entirely false, but because the part that’s true is sometimes not the part that gets mentioned.

And there’s a deeper layer in this. The people who say with most conviction that children can’t handle change have observed children almost exclusively in environments designed to minimize exactly that. Same school for years, same neighborhood, same friends, same schedule. They have never seen, up close and over time, a child for whom change is the norm rather than the exception. So when they say children can’t handle it, they’re describing with some accuracy the children who were never taught to handle it, not children in general. Their reference is real but incomplete. And an incomplete reference presented as universal can do real damage to someone trying to do something different.

Noa has lived what most people would call a lot of instability. Many countries, many languages, many new faces, many goodbyes that to adults would seem hard to process. And yet, watching her, what I see is not a child traumatized by change. I see a child who quickly reads a new environment. Who identifies in a short time where the rules are, who the relevant people are, how the place works. Who has a tolerance for uncertainty that I didn’t develop until well into my thirties, and only after a lot of conscious effort to build it. That didn’t come from nowhere. It came from having practiced exactly that, over and over, in real situations with real consequences.

You don’t have to look only at families like ours to see this. The children of military personnel and diplomats have been changing countries, languages, schools, and friends every two or three years for generations, not by lifestyle choice but because of the professional structure of their parents’ lives. No one asks whether they’re stable enough. And what the research on those communities shows is not a generation damaged by instability. It shows people with a tolerance for uncertainty and a capacity for adaptation that tends to be above average. Movement, when it has a solid emotional foundation, doesn’t damage. It trains.

That said, I don’t think all change is good or that instability is a value in itself. There are changes that do cause damage. The ones that are abrupt and unprepared for. The ones that happen when a child is already managing too much. The ones that come alongside family conflict, simultaneous losses, an absence of adult presence that offers something solid to lean on. Change isn’t the problem or the solution. It’s the context that determines what change does. And in that context, the most determining factor isn’t whether the child moves or stays put, but whether there are people nearby who are genuinely present, who don’t avoid the difficult conversations, who don’t pretend everything is fine when it isn’t. What holds a child steady in the face of change isn’t the permanence of the place. It’s the permanence of who accompanies them.

Some time ago, a friend asked me whether Noa missed having a more fixed life. I asked her myself, in front of him, because it seemed more honest than answering for her. Noa thought for a moment, in the way she has of taking questions seriously. Then she said something like: yes, sometimes she missed specific people, but she didn’t miss being in the same place all the time. That she liked knowing that when she got bored of a place she could go somewhere else. My friend nodded slowly, the way you do when you’re processing something you didn’t expect. And I stayed with the difference between missing people and missing a place. Because that also says something. About what actually matters. And about who, in the end, is the one who can’t handle the change.

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This article is part of the series **The Manual That Doesn’t Exist — on the assumptions about children’s education that rarely get examined. Links to each article are added as they are published.**