As a digital nomad family, my family and I have been on this adventurous journey for almost six months now, and I can confidently say that the experience so far has been one of the most challenging but also one of the most rewarding we have had as a family.
We are working fully remotely while home-schooling our three kids, who are between primary and secondary school. When we first set out on this adventure, we did our homework and prepared an elaborate multilingual curriculum and scouted out activities in places we were visiting. Come Day 1 of home-schooling, and absolute chaos broke loose. Since then, we have made numerous adjustments and learned slowly to adapt to a life where we are together 24/7 as a family. Read more here about our lived insights on educating our children while traveling.
I wanted to share with you some of the things we have learned along the way, and some of the things we are still trying to figure out as we continue our journey together:
Be disciplined about work and play
We follow a fairly disciplined lifestyle and abide by a strict timeline during the day so that we can all optimize on our work while soaking in our travels, have fun and go sightseeing. When we first started traveling, we stayed with family in familiar settings – places we called homes away from home. There wasn’t a great deal of exploration and sightseeing to be done, so we focused on working and home-schooling for most of the day.
After leaving our families, we kept this rhythm and realized far too late into our trip that time was flying by quickly and that we weren’t really taking the time to discover the new cities and countries as much as we should be. Now we aim for greater productivity rather than following a schedule. We all take our work seriously because this way we can take our leisure time seriously too.
Listen to each other
When you spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week together, you learn how to enjoy each other’s company (oftentimes in silence), but also how to respect each other’s space. I remember when I used to come home from the office and find the kids having dinner, we would immediately jump into long conversations about our day, review homework and make plans together.
On average we would spend less than three, sometimes four, hours together on a daily basis. Time was scarce. Now, as we spend the entire day together, we are learning to listen to each other and to communicate without talking all the time. You would be surprised how much you find out about each other when you allow yourself to stop and really listen.
Be realistic about the transaction cost of moving around
Every time you change addresses, cities, countries and time zones, there are inevitable transaction costs associated with the amount of time, energy and money it takes to get from Point A to Point B with kids, luggage and logistics. A three-hour plane trip quickly turns into a day-long affair when you count how much in advance you need to arrive at the airport, the time it takes to find transportation for five people and countless luggages and bags and the energy it takes to get to know a new neighborhood and its resources.
Not to mention, the time it takes to pack up and to settle back down a day before and a day after arrival. Don’t expect to deliver a huge presentation and have the kids finish their latest home-schooling modules while you wait a few hours for a layover in the airport. It won’t happen!
We still have half our trip to go, and I know that this list will look very different soon. Sign up here to receive our newsletters and learn more about how other digital nomad families raise their kids.
