How we used to raise our kids

First, it’s important to understand a base level that almost everyone on the earth is expected to do for their children.

Since the dawn of civilization, we’ve been told to create a home for our babies, make them sleep in their own rooms, learn through mass education 5 days a week and protect them from a big bad world until they’re old enough to make their own choices, be that in their career, voting preferences, the works.

It's easy to see why this has been the norm for so long too. 99% of the world’s population is a workforce. The cogs that keep the world’s economic machines turning.

I’m not here to spout conspiratorial BS at you. It's not “all an illusion man”. This is just economics 101. To become an economic powerhouse and compete with other countries, you need to mobilise your population to actually work and produce something you can export.

Provide for your family, give them a good education, get them a job, let them fall in love, create a family, educate their kids, get them a job, etc.

How the world actually works

I’m a strong believer in boiling things down to their constituent parts. It makes the seemingly impassable mountain much more of a walk in the park if you can see how things actually are

So let's walk through the park together and look at a few of the important ways the world works.

Once you see yourself as an asset they’ve bought, you open yourself up to a wider world of income-generating possibilities. You no longer need to feel limited to working the hours someone else sets you, or to work 8 hours a day for yourself either if you’re self-employed.

You just need to create something valuable and sell that asset to others.

This is how the economic world actually works. Financial markets are about the value of assets, not the effort put in.

This is often why people complain so much about working “so hard” and getting paid peanuts while the “fat cats” seemingly do no work at all and get paid large bonuses.

The sooner you understand it's about the current market value for your services and not how many calories you burned during “work hours”, the sooner you can move on from a traditional approach to work and business and realise your ultimate goal of spending more time with your family.

This may sound like a massive tangent from the subject of why children need adventure, but it's an important perspective shift you need to make. You don’t need to work “full time” and never see your kids. You don’t have to find a job and sell your time to provide stability for your children.

In fact, children have literally no concept of work and time for that matter. They do however have a firm grasp of the value of family and a keen ability to learn quickly.

The entire setup is balanced on a knife edge

The house you own or rent, within easy travel distance of your children’s school, is costing you money. You need to maintain your employment status to generate that income and you need to keep on working every month to make sure the pack of cards doesn’t fall down.

If you are unable to work, whether through injury, redundancy or an inability to keep your job for whatever reason, the cost of your setup will soon become apparent.

The cost isn’t just financial either. Often it's also a huge cost to your mental health. Trying to maintain “stability” for your child is costing you your life.

Whether it's working long hours, grinding in a stressful job, or keeping up with the cost of your lifestyle, it all adds up and could all fall apart very easily.!How economics dictate your education

With the cost of living currently on the rise, this tightrope you’re walking has become even more apparent.

Your budget is being pushed to the limit, adding stress to your life and potentially even giving you less time to spend with your children in order to make ends meet.

What if there was a way to step off the tightrope and actually spend more time with your children? What if this actually cost you less money? What if the dream life you’d love to provide for your family was actually better for you all?

The cost of your child’s education is so much greater than just the school you send them to.

In fact, it's entirely possible that traditional education could be detrimental to their future anyway.

The days of having a job for life are gone

Not only that, but the types of jobs currently available may be replaced with cheaper workforces overseas, as remote working becomes ever more popular.

Why pay someone in the USA or the UK to remote work a job that could be done by someone in India or China for less?

Many industries, from manufacturing to engineering, customer services and IT, have been victims of an increasingly well-educated workforce in countries with lower costs of living and lower wages.!Image

Our children will need to find careers and build businesses that are robust enough to tackle both of these aspects.

Something that can withstand increasing automation by technology and remain valuable when other parts of the world could potentially offer the same service for less.

I’m not going to list jobs and businesses here, I’ll save that for another article, but it’s important to understand that a “well-rounded education” followed by years of college and university is not the answer to the rapidly advancing reality of future business needs.

Thinking outside the box

Lets say your child has a love of animals. They clearly love to be around animals and have a natural connection to wildlife.

Traditional thinking would say “this child could work as a vet, maybe at a Zoo, maybe at an animal shelter!”.

This mode of thought would favour nurturing a base-level education and working hard to keep them in school, with years of studying and training before finally being sent out into the world to work with animals.

Out of the box thinking would say something very different…!Thinking outside the box on education

“Helping animals is her passion. She could create a passive income business that generates wealth and gives her the freedom to explore all sorts of volunteering and charity work with animals all over the world”

An upbringing based on adventure teaches us about opportunity while giving us the confidence to try new things and the flexibility to turn things on their head without the fear of failure.

These are the skills that create resourceful kids, flexible enough to take on whatever the world throws at them. If you’re more flexible, the fear that things may break becomes far less.

It also teaches children how to weather the storm, take the good with the bad and make the most of situations. Something no stable, predictable academic upbringing can provide.

Why wait until after their formal education to teach them how the world really functions? Children don’t need protection from the world, they need to learn how to work and thrive within it.

Isn’t it a huge risk leaving behind a familiar life in a familiar country and travelling to lands unknown?

I get asked this question all the time. People see extended travel as something that is risky, breaking away from the norm and gambling your life just to have an adventure.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s just a perspective from those that have never lived it.

Ask any digital nomad or world-schooling family and they’ll tell you that the truth is way cooler.

The fact is there are very few countries that you could live in which wouldn’t enrich the lives of you and your family.

I do, however, fully admit that some countries are better to start with than others. Some countries are the perfect introduction for your children to get to grips with the idea of living an adventure rather than a dull life back in your country of origin.

Your children are still learning about the world, so throwing them into a culture that is wildly different to the one they’re used to probably isn’t the smartest first move.

The positive impact adventure has on children

Over the years, I’ve watched children grow and friends and family become older and more mature while experiencing the world around them and getting massively influenced by it all.

The problem is that a repetitive lifestyle doesn’t breed excitement and curiosity. A “one size fits all” approach to education doesn’t teach flexibility and the seeking of opportunities.

What you think is stable and safe could actually be harming your children’s flare for life.

We’ve all seen the light in the eyes of young children. Almost every day is an adventure to them, free from the school system and instead learning through play all day long. So wired that they barely want to go to sleep.

Then we send our kids to school and slowly, as they become teenagers, the fire starts to dwindle. The endless cycle of school runs and dull lessons in stuffy classrooms starts to extinguish their love for adventure and curiosity. They long to get the school day over and get back to chatting with their friends on social media.

Who can blame them? We did this to them. We decided the world would have to wait. We told them to “go to school, get an education and get a job”, but they didn’t ask for this.

The world is their classroom

It’s a cliche quote, but it is most certainly true. Education is best learnt when applied and adventure-led lifestyles let children put theory into practice on a daily basis.

When locations change, culture changes and even the views change, our children can apply their newly gained skills to another location, another culture and another landscape.

Mass-educated kids are expected to learn for many years without applying their knowledge to something tangible.

Adventure-educated children apply it in real-time, learning as they go and influencing what adventure to take next to nurture that learning process.!Image

If your children ever experienced a life before travel, then they will always have a connection to somewhere they once deemed home. Things like social media are entirely set up for people with a stable lifestyle, so you can’t avoid the exposure they will get to what is deemed a “normal” life.

By the time nomadic adventure-led children reach their teenage years, they are generally open-minded and supportive human beings. They still face many challenges as a teenager, but they have the skills to handle them with a much more positive outcome.

Finding other families with teenagers can be a challenge. Because it's perceived that travelling with children is hard and with teenagers even harder, it would appear a larger number of teenage families return home.

This perpetuates the issue by meaning there are fewer teenagers for other teenagers to bond with while travelling. The solution to this is travelling to destinations where you know there are families with teenagers. Also, you should try bonding via zoom calls and online messages so that they hit the ground running on arrival.!Worldschooling with teenagers

Recharging your emotional batteries

The safety and security of a parent’s management of that adventure-based lifestyle are what keep them going when surrounded by new and exciting locations.

At some point though, it's entirely likely they’ll want a few weeks in a location where they don’t feel the need to rely on anyone.

Travelling families with teenagers often allow them a month or so with a grandparent to recharge their emotional batteries before rejoining their adventure once more somewhere in the world.

It's also a chance to stretch their wings a little and travel alone, at least back to a destination where you as a parent feel comfortable with and where there’s a relative waiting for them at the airport.!Image

If a trip home isn’t an option

For many, it may be a financial impossibility to travel “home” for a quick recharge. Or the much more likely scenario is that you just don’t want to go home, even if you do miss elements of your past life.

There are of course ways and means to get a home fix without going home. The internet has made that much easier in recent years.

It's important to take some time out to understand what it is you’re really missing. Is it friends? Family? Routine? Your favourite coffee shop in your hometown? What is it about those places and people that’s currently missing from your adventurous location?

By investigating those details, you may find that there’s a running theme throughout them all, or there’s something bigger going on with your situation that needs addressing.

Are there needs that aren’t being met?

Is your routine not allowing for the things you really need to support a healthy mind?

Is the work / life balance out of alignment, causing your adventure-based lifestyle to not meet your expectations?

This too shall pass

If you’re an adventure seeker at heart and you’ve instilled mindset this into your kids too, then oftentimes the return to a traditionally “stable” mode of life is short-lived. You may be home for 12 months, perhaps longer, but at some point the urge to broaden your horizons will kick back in again.

Of course, there’s no guarantee of this, but I have seen it in multiple families over the years, including my own. Once you’ve “taken the red pill” and opened up your life to a wider number of possibilities, it's often difficult to fully sink back into that “normal” life.

I want to make it clear that there is nothing wrong with a stable life. You haven’t failed if you return to one. An adventure-led life is merely another option, so you’ll know what is the best fit for you and your children given their needs as they grow older.

Monitoring your children’s needs and knowing what would benefit them the most is really the key to all of this. After reading this article, you may find that what they really need to nurture their personality and growth is stability.

It may be that regular new locations aren't a good fit for your children’s personalities or that slower travel with longer periods in each country is much more rewarding.

Maybe they want to have a say in exactly where you go and what you do, no longer happy to just follow their parents everywhere and bored of museums, water parks and road trips.

Choosing a more adventure-led life comes with extra challenges and an acute requirement to know your children well and ensure that they are getting the most out of the life you’ve chosen.

Generally speaking, people that opt for a more traditional, stable life aren’t even aware of what would really benefit their kids. Instead, they choose state schools, full-time jobs and a life of compromises, a choice their children are also forced to take.

Parents often have to work late and commute long hours just to pay for the house, the bills and education. Kids then find themselves in a school they may not like or feel is a good fit for them with only a small pool of children their age to make friends, or possibly enemies, with.

For some, this regimented routine might actually be a good fit. For others, it's the exact opposite of what they need.

Whatever you choose, the important thing is to find out and to a certain degree take an educated guess at how their surroundings, schooling and daily life will affect their growth.

This is the toughest nut to crack for any parent, whichever life you choose. I’m not gonna lie, you’ll always feel like you’re ruining your kids' lives on some days.

But so far, in my experience, I feel like that a lot less often when my children are living their best lives, filled with new friends, ways to learn and places to learn too.!How to get the right mindset for success