Moving Abroad: The Decision
When I gave birth to the twins, I knew that I didn’t want to put them in traditional school. I originally planned to hire a private teacher because I wanted them to be on target with the national academic standards. However, after doing extensive research on the benefits of homeschooling and the different types of homeschooling, I decided that I wanted to unschool them……
What is unschooling?
Unschooling is child-led learning, allowing the child to fully indulge in their interests. The premise behind unschooling is that children learn more, and retain information better, when they have the desire to know more about a particular subject.
With the decision to unschool, I began to work long hours, in order to save enough money to be a stay-at-home single mom. I know that sounds crazy, but I actually thought that was a possibility. I knew that being a work-from-home single mom was fairly easily attainable. However, my mind fooled me into believing that I could actually stay at home, without working or earning any income, if I saved enough.
Laughable, right? Thinking back on it now, I would have had to work and save until my kids were at least fifteen years old in order to have enough money in the bank to literally stop working. That would have totally defeated the purpose.
Before I realized my plan was basically impossible, I was forced to stop working because the world was halted, due to the pandemic. I wasn’t too worried, at first. I honestly thought the world would close for a couple months and then magically go back to normal. I was obviously horribly wrong! The longer the pandemic went on, the more depressed I became. I felt like my dreams were crushed because I couldn’t work, and hence, couldn’t save money.
I went from making $45 an hour and working 60-hour work-weeks to receiving $1,100 per week from unemployment. Of course, my expenses actually increased because we were all at home all day. The grocery bill increased, as did all other household expenses. Imagine trying to adjust your budget to less than half of your income, overnight. It was extremely disheartening.
Since we were already forced to be home, I started to try my hand at unschooling. At the time, the twins were only three years old. I was actually trying to let two 3-year-olds lead me in teaching them. I believe that experienced unschooling parents would have no problem with this. However, as a new unschooling parent, who was over forty and had older children that had been traditionally educated, allowing two 3-year-olds to tell me what they were interested in learning was a setup for total failure.
Back to the Drawing Board
After failing horribly at unschooling, but still believing it could be done, I began to do more research. I figured out that my twins needed more inspiration to figure out their interest. They also needed an environment that was conducive to learning. Being stuck in the house was not a great learning environment, nor was it arousing their interest in anything other than their siblings’ belongings, which were off-limits.
Realizing that a change in their environment, and mine, would work wonders for finding what they were genuinely interested in, and relieving my depression, I decided that we had to move. I had no idea where I could afford to move to, so I began researching, once again. This time my research led me in a totally different direction.
I stumbled up on the term “worldschooling” and began to dig deeper into what that meant. According to Time4Learning, an online educational platform, “Worldschooling is an educational movement that recognizes that a student can receive no greater education than by experiencing and interacting with the world around them.”
The thought of being able to travel AND educate my children at the same time was like a dream come true. I have always loved to travel. The pay and travel benefits were the only things that I actually liked about my former job. Now that I had the revelation that I could resurrect my dead dream of unschooling my children, while traveling the world, I was elated to get started.
I decided that I wanted to travel six to eight months of the year. I didn’t want to travel full time, so I would need a comfortable home base to come back to after my many trips. Because I had already figured out that I could not afford to live in the United States, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and look into moving abroad. And just like that, the decision to move abroad had been made.
Thank you for reading. If you want more of the story, be sure to read my next blog, Moving Abroad: The Process.