[Acclimatization of relocated children and adolescents]

The effects of return migration on emotional well-being were studied in those school-aged children and adolescents who had returned to northern Finland from Sweden during 1984 and 1985. Each of the 320 returning children and adolescents was assigned a control from the same class at school, matched for age and sex, who had not emigrated. According to a parent questionnaire, the returning boys were irritable more often than the control boys, and they also scored higher on the self-report scale "Children's Depression Inventory." In the teachers' evaluations (Rutter B2 Scale), the returning boys had psychiatric disorders more often than their controls. For both returning boys and girls, overall scholastic achievement was poorer than in the controls, but performance in foreign languages (mainly English) was better. If the father was absent from the family, this was reflected in the scholastic achievement and emotional well-being of both the returnees and the control subjects. How well the children coped with their return to Finland was also affected by what the language of instruction had been in Sweden, whether there had been a language change upon returning to Finland and how much mental preparation there had been for moving.