As devoted parents of young kids, one consideration took center stage for us: our children’s upbringing. By this, Eirik and I meant not just formal education, social life and the skills to succeed in the long term, but also a practical understanding of the world and their place in it, a durable passion for discovery, and robust family relationships. Now, it would not be wrong to say that our kids’ Northern Californian upbringing was an embarrassment of riches. But seen through the lens of our previous lifestyle and travels, as well as my career working with low-income populations in developing countries of Africa and Asia, and in those halcyon, pre-pandemic days of the 2010s, our kids’ idyllic suburban California lives were—well, exactly that—an embarrassment of riches. Meanwhile, we parents felt overwhelmed and stifled by the day-to-day logistics, house maintenance and all the other operational details of making that life possible.
Personally, I sensed an increasing estrangement from my kids. On the one hand, I strived to fulfill the suburban mothering role that I thought was required, though it did not fully align with my natural strengths and inclinations. Sure, I wanted my kids to excel in everything they loved, but frankly I loathed driving around town in circles, waiting for them at lessons and spending Saturdays on the edge of the soccer field; I also disliked the alternative of handing over piles of cash to our caregivers (as much as we loved them) so they could spend quality time with my kids while we brought home the bacon.
Meanwhile, my work and travels centered on providing very poor mothers with the tools and resources they needed to succeed as entrepreneurs and feed their impoverished families. By day, I might be analyzing the impacts that West African children’s savings accounts had on family financial well-being, or visiting a rural Indian village to hear a mother’s tearful gratitude for the training that enabled her to save her second baby from the diarrhea-induced dehydration death of her first. On evenings and weekends, I was a privileged Mama-Taxi/soccer mom. The juxtaposition of these worlds made for daily culture shock. In our Northern California community, while other parents’ jobs may not have made for such a stark contrast, I was certainly not alone in the broader sense of this discord. I think that many fortunate parents worldwide struggle with how to provide their children with a stable, happy, optimistic childhood, while also exposing them to the realities of the world and preventing a sense of entitlement, superiority or jadedness.
The more we thought about it, the more Eirik and I realized that if the sky was the limit, then we wanted something else for our kids and for ourselves as parents. We dreamed of showing them the world as a way of helping them develop practical life skills, resilience, humility and gratefulness. We wanted them to experience the joy and goodness of people of all walks of life, to recognize their own privilege and where they fit in the world, and to genuinely value diversity and different perspectives. We talked about how, as children, Eirik and I had both fantasized about traveling to the rarified places our parents talked about to learn from the real world. We wanted to spark their curiosity and instill a lifelong love of learning. And last but not least, Eirik and I aspired to thrive and grow alongside our kids, to share in their learning, to engage and relate to them through the good, the bad and the ugly of the wider world.
We had already discovered that as individuals, as a couple and as parents, we were at our best when actively exploring and creating. We hoped to conjure our best selves by venturing out and forging a joint path through the world as a family. “Dream big and take the leap” is basically our motto. Within six months we would sell our house, offload practically all our belongings, pack our four suitcases, drop our SUV at CarMax, and hop a flight to Costa Rica with our kids ages two, six and eight. Our NYC friends were right: we couldn’t last in California.
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