Reflecting on her childhood, Barnes recalled, "So much had changed since the first years of my life, spent living in the woods, years when we moved from one logging site to another." Unlike Barnes, economic opportunity was not the motivation for Hale's migration, but her life of movement revolved around her mother's need to flee. .
Hale's mother dragged her from city to city attempting to escape her father. In one section of her writing, "Daughter of Winter," Hale described what a video of her childhood would look like: "I would show, among other things, a montage of my mother and myself on the run. . . . We"re runnin" from Dad and his drinkin". . . . We"re runnin" towards a new beginning, a fresh start that somehow never pans out." Besides different causes for moving, Barnes and Hale also had different feelings towards their migration. Although the Barnes's often moved, she believed that her family and her way of life would always remain stable: "I had moved many times as a child and had come to believe that even in strange homes and new schools, some things would always remain constant, the love of my parents, the circle of our family and my belief in God." While Barnes was able to find some steadiness in her childhood, Hale's constant moving left her ungrounded. She usually did not have a stable household on the move. In one instance, Hale found herself living "in the storage shack being my youngest sister's house." The encompassing instability that surrounded Hale as a child drastically changed her life. The transient aspect of both Hale and Barnes" childhoods shaped their adolescence and adulthoods.
Although moving was an important aspect of Barnes and Hales" development, the most extensive portion of both authors" writing focused around their families. Both writers described their relationships with their parents and the roles the women filled in their families in depth.