INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE RESIDENTIAL-MOBILITY OF AMERICA CHILDREN

Americans in general have high rates of residential mobility, but American children are especially mobile compared to children in several other Western countries and Japan. This finding holds up under different ways of conceptualizing mobility and stability. The paper develops alternative explanations of the "excess" mobility of U. S. children and concludes that the most likely explanation is greater family disruption and childhood poverty in the United States. The paper identifies what is an average number of moves for children at successive ages and models the association of selected socioeconomic and other variables with different measures of mobility.