Are your children ready to make the leap into location independence?

So you’ve decided to become a location independent parent. That means your children have to become location independent too – and for some children that could be a big problem.

For many younger children, routine and familiarity are everything, while for older ones, it’s attachment to their peers that may prove a sticking point. It’s a real worry for parents, who may worry that their children may not settle into the nomadic lifestyle and won’t be happy when you move abroad.

The lesson I learned when moving from the UK to the Caribbean is that preparation is everything. Here are some strategies you can try…

Check Out Your Location Independent Destination

Many people spend a long time planning for their next move. If this is you, and you’re planning a semi-permanent relocation to somewhere that you visit regularly, schedule a family trip to that destination to ‘sell’ it to your kids.

Plan some fun activities that they will remember when you return to your current home, so they will have something to look forward to when you move. If you’ve got friends with children, plan some get-togethers so that when your children arrive in the new location, they already know someone there. That will ease the transition for them.

Living Space

Do you already know where you’re going to live? Then show it to your kids. If a visit to the location is feasible, then do that, otherwise use Google Earth and other web resources to give your kids as much information as you can about the country they are moving to.

Use the Internet to find photos of the place you will be visiting, research fun activities in the area and generally get informed about your destination. With older children get them to help. They can create a wish list of things to do when they arrive and prepare a scrapbook to tell their current friends about where they will be going.

In our case, we were relocating permanently (more or less, anyway) and we were able to show our daughter the house and her room. We took photos back to the UK with us so she could show them to her friends. We started this process about nine months before the move.

Education

How are you going to educate your children?

You may already be homeschooling, in which case you will be doing the same thing in a different location. If not, let older children help you research schools and visit them all when you arrive (preferably before the start of the school term or semester).

Hook up with a couple of expat groups who may have children in the same schools. This will give your kids a small circle of friends to start with.

Focus On Fun

If your children have any favourite activities then find out where they can do these in the place that you are going. It will help them to feel that they are not leaving their entire way of life behind.

Also, explain to your kids why you are going and what benefits you think it will bring. Kids have a sense of adventure – so appeal to it!

Preparing To Move

Get your children involved in the preparation process. Even children as young as three can make decisions about which toys to take and which to leave in storage. We gave our daughter a suitcase of her own so that she could decide what would go with us and what would come later.

Be sure to explain that toys which are being boxed are not being thrown away but saved. Our daughter was also happy to help wrap items for packing (even if we had to add some extra tape later!).

Keeping In Touch

The great thing is that these days, moving halfway around the world doesn’t have to mean losing touch with your friends. Photos of the people and places they love really help, so get that camera out!

If you have email, a laptop with a webcam and Skype, your kids can talk to friends and family back home, which will make the transition easier. When my daughter first used a webcam, she was very excited. And now, she regularly Skypes with a friend in Gibraltar while they play an online game together.

Talk, Talk, Talk

For us, the key aspect of the whole thing was communication. Our daughter had lots of friends whom she’d known since birth and was a bit upset about leaving them. All our friends talked to the children about the fact that we were leaving, but would still be in touch.

We spent lots of time together, took lots of photos and exchanged Skype IDs. Since we’ve left, several of my daughter’s friends have come to visit and we’ve been back to the UK once. And although she missed her friends at first, and still talks about the UK, she’s settled well into her new life.

Photo credit: Japs – TheGypsy)

Image by marcomagrini

Not all location independent parents are willing or able to home school. For some it might be a question of temperament, for others a lack of qualification, for still others, the desire to have some time to themselves.

If you have decided not to home school, then that has major implications for your life as a location independent parent. Issues to consider include:

• Do you uproot your family whenever you feel like it, taking your child to a different school each time?
• Do you limit your travel to periods in between periods of instruction, staying for longer times in a single location?
• Do you combine the two, having a period of stability each year, followed by a period of travel?
• How important is it for your child to be educated in a single system of education or the system that belongs to your home nation?
• What implications do your choices have for their future education and employment?

Whatever, you decide, if you are not homeschooling, then you will need to find a school in your current or future location. Here are a few tips on how to do that…

Finding A School

There are several options for finding the right school. If you know where you are going to go, a good starting point is the governing body for education in the country, such as Ofsted in the UK or a ministry of education. You can usually get a list of schools from here or search online to find schools in the area where you will be.

Websites giving advice to diplomats may also have useful information on schools, though this is not always up to date. The next step is to check out inspection reports if these exist. Of course, these reports only give an outline of academic results. In order to find out more about what a school is really like, it’s worth visiting forums for expats where people will discuss their true feelings about particular schools. All of this can help you narrow down a shortlist of schools to consider.

If you can, make a reconnaissance visit to see your shortlisted schools for yourself. You can phone or email ahead to make appointments to view the school and talk to the principals or head teachers. If you can’t then plan your arrival well before the start of the school year to give you time to view the school and complete any necessary paperwork. Some countries require student visas for expat pupils and it can take quite a while to obtain these.

Evaluating The School

There are several questions to ask when evaluating a school. As well as the standard ones, issues for location independent parents to consider include:

• What is the language of instruction? Will your children have to learn a new language to benefit from education? If your children are beyond the kindergarten stage, you may have to find a school that teaches in your home language.
• State or private? In some countries the state schools are excellent and you may be happy with this as a choice for your child. In others, you may prefer to take advantage of the breadth of curriculum and additional activities offered by a private school.
• Transferability? Will the qualifications your child gains be transferable to other education systems?
• Start of instruction? Some educational systems start teaching children at just under five years of age, while others leave it as late as 7. This may be an issue if moving from one country to another.
• Examinations? Some educational systems have rigorous testing of pupils at various ages, while others just let them proceed through the system. This may be an issue for example where your child has to take the 11 plus exam, even though this will be of no use later.
• Corporal punishment – around the world there are still hundreds of schools where this is the norm. This may be a deal breaker.

Some Options For Education

For kindergarten and primary age children, Montessori schools provide a breadth of education and encourage critical thinking. There are dozens of these around the world; you can find out if there is one in your local area on this website.

Secondary education can be a minefield. Educational options in schools around the world may not always meet your expectations, though they may sometimes exceed them. Some schools offer an international baccalaureate which prepares your children for university in many countries around the world. Others provide a liberal arts education and style themselves ‘university prep’ schools, though without a specific examination to prove it. If your children already know what type of further study they want to do, you may be able to enroll them in a school that specializes in this area or will prepare them to meet the requirements of the institution of their choice.

Even if your educational arrangements are more flexible than in other households, don’t get stressed about it. Your children will get a view of  the world that many don’t have – and that will stand them in good stead for the rest their lives.

Image by Soultravelers3

One of the things we hope to convey with this site is the fact that there is no single *best* way to be location independent parents, travel the world nor educate your child. We all choose to do different things, based upon what works for each of us. So with that in mind, we have interviewed a wide range of location independent parents (of all types – nomadic or not) to demonstrate this!

We also have found it useful to be able to point to others living this lifestyle, when faced with questions and challenges from friends and family – so with this series, we’re hoping to give you plenty of social proof for this very purpose!

In the first of these interviews, we feature Soultravelers3 – a family of 3 who travel full-time around the globe together…

What type of location independent parent are you? Please give us a brief overview of what you do & how it allows you to be location independent.

We are a digital nomadic family on an open-ended world tour. Since 2006 we have traveled over 175,000 miles to 32 countries on 4 continents so far.

We use every mode of transportation from camels to cargo ship and stay in many places from 5 star hotels to pensions, but our primary mode is slow, green, frugal travel via small motorhome for 6 or 7 months of good weather and then wintering in a lux but cheap rental home in a warm location. Thus far it has been the same beautiful white village in Southern Spain where our daughter goes to the local school in her 2nd language (1st thru 4th grade), but next winter it will be in Malaysia where our daughter will immerse in Mandarin.

Please give us an overview of the benefits you feel that being location independent brings to you & your family?

There are so many…including:

• Greater bonding as a family
• More time together
• Best possible education for our child as a 21st century global citizen
• We can travel the world MUCH cheaper than living at home
• Wonderful shared experiences
• Meeting amazing people
• Seeing and experiencing untold beauty of this earth
• Total freedom
• Living the dream

What about schooling? How do you do it on the road?

We homeschool all year round in English. We have it down to a science on the move, an easy habit like brushing teeth,  so it only takes an hour or two a day for basic work & we can carry homeschool supplies with us even when we go off for months of travel with just a small day pack each. Our child is doing school work many years ahead of age peers in school.

It truly is much easier than most people realize and a perfect combination with travel. We find that we can get much more education out of much less time put into it. Life as a family global field trip is an awesome education!

We homeschool a small amount daily at her level in English all year round and also use the local school in Spain for 5/6 months out of the year for deep immersion into her 2nd language, literature & culture. Next year she will start immersing in Mandarin in Malaysia while she is still young enough for her brain to be more open to learning languages.

Immersing in a language deeply allows one to immerse more deeply into a culture and the literature. Based on demographics, we think knowing Mandarin Chinese and Spanish well will be assets to our child’s future, so we started exposure while she was in the womb. We personally find that going to a local school and living in an area where the language is dominant is one of the best possible & easiest ways to learn a language.

Much of our daughter’s  homeschooling is done through her reading – books are and always have been the mainstay of our homeschooling. Raise a reader and life becomes easy because they learn so much on their own just having fun!