For most families, the question of how children learn, grow and stay connected to school is settled by postcode and routine. For one Welsh family, it is now being answered from a backpack. Dani and Tom Wooldridge, from Rhondda Cynon Taf, have sold their home and possessions and taken their three children, Olivia, 12, Morgan, seven, and four-year-old George, on an open-ended journey around the world, an account of which was published by the BBC at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm75pldpzrv5o.
The decision will strike many parents as familiar in its dilemmas, if extreme in its execution. How do you keep a child’s education on track when there is no classroom? How do children hold on to friendships when they leave them behind? And what does a family owe itself when the demands of work, mortgages and routine crowd out the years when children are young?
The Wooldridges were, by their own account, living a settled and comfortable life. Dani, 39, worked as a nurse and ran an aesthetics business; Tom, 38, ran a construction business. About seven years ago they bought a 1970s house and poured work into making it a family home. Yet in May this year, the five of them flew one-way to Indonesia, everything they own packed into luggage holds.
The couple say the idea had been a long-running conversation that always lost out to practical life. “It was always a conversation we had but once you start having kids and you’ve got the mortgage and everything like that it’s kind of, ‘oh it’s not the right time,’” Dani said. What changed was a month-long family holiday in Thailand over Christmas nearly two years ago. The children, then almost two years younger, coped remarkably well. “It all went really smoothly and it was great seeing the kids experience a completely different world to what we’d all grown up,” Tom said.
That trip prompted serious research, including lists of positives and negatives and meetings with other families who had made similar moves. The questions were the ordinary ones any household would ask: how would the children be educated, and what would happen to the home, the businesses and the careers? Once decided, they committed fully. Dani initially considered renting the house out to keep something to return to, but the couple chose to sell, unwilling to leave the burden of managing it on relatives and friends back home.
The children’s reactions split along lines of age and attachment. Morgan and George were excited from the start. Olivia, who had begun high school only the previous September, was apprehensive about leaving her friends. “Morgan and George do mention their friends now and again, but they’re a bit younger so they didn’t have that emotional attachment as much as Olivia,” Tom said. The grandparents’ first response was to ask why they were selling everything they had worked so hard for. “Most people have got bets on when we’re coming back,” Dani laughed. Tom added: “They’ve all got a year each.”
Five months in, speaking from Lombok, the couple describe an itinerary that has taken them from the crowded beaches of Uluwatu and the volcanic climb of Mount Batur to the inland village of Ubud, then eastwards across the Indonesian archipelago and back. The first days were overwhelming: heightened senses, jet lag, a daughter still emotionally up and down, and roads busy with scooters. But there were compensations. “The food instantly was amazing. And the people are just beautiful, and so kind,” Tom said.
Education remains central to the family’s plan, and this is where the story speaks most directly to any parent weighing opportunity against experience. The couple follow the UK curriculum, carrying a “huge bag” of textbooks recommended by teachers. Olivia has an online maths tutor who once led the maths department at her high school and even taught Tom there. A second tutor covers the primary curriculum for the boys and some English and science for Olivia. In Lombok the children have attended a world schooling centre, which the couple describe as a lovely routine with amazing friends. Dani is clear about the goal: if the children want university and careers such as medicine or nursing, those doors must remain open.
The costs are real. What the family misses most is not material but human: the close family and friendship group left behind. Tom has already flown home once for a funeral. Even so, the couple judge that the confidence the children have gained from meeting a wide variety of people and living outdoors outweighs the negatives.
Practicalities have been learned on the move. Having brought “way too much stuff”, they have given possessions away and pared down to two 120-litre backpacks and two 100-litre rolling packs, one filled with educational materials. The children carry almost nothing, a plan they have not fully embraced.
Malaysia comes next, with an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo and another world schooling centre planned, then Thailand, where both sets of grandparents will visit and Dani will turn 40, followed by Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Beyond Asia, nothing is fixed beyond a likely brief trip home. “Just keep going for as long as we can, and want to,” Tom said. Dani’s top destination is an African safari; Tom’s is Tahiti, for the surfing. Whether the family returns in a year, as the bets at home suggest, or years from now, their journey is a live experiment in a question many families quietly ask themselves: what, exactly, is all this working for?