We are Colin Clapp and Elly McGuinness, the founders of Parenting and Passports. We are a New Zealand-based family and we have been living and traveling location-independently since early 2017.
Our eldest daughter, born late in 2013, was a toddler when we started. Our youngest, born early in 2019, knows no other life.
This is our story (so far)…
Where it all began
Like most stories, this one has more than one starting point. But the real catalyst came at the end of 2016.
We had been building businesses in New Zealand. The country is genuinely idyllic, and the life we had built looked fine from the outside. But underneath, things had been slowly unraveling. Businesses that were not working. Financial pressure that kept building. A work-life balance that had tipped so far in one direction it had stopped feeling like balance at all.
We were working harder than ever. But the rewards were getting smaller.
Our health and the relationship were taking the hit. And once we saw it clearly, we could not unsee it.
Enough was enough.
The decision
We did not have a detailed plan. But we knew we needed to change direction and take control of our lives.
We sold what we could, put the rest in a small storage unit, and left New Zealand in early 2017 with two full backpacks, one suitcase, three day packs, and a few cuddly toys for one very excited little girl.
The lightness was the first surprise. The freedom that came with owning less, moving slower, and choosing differently was real from the start.
People we knew reacted as people tend to when a family does something genuinely outside the ordinary. Not with disapproval, mostly. More with a kind of wide-eyed ‘really?’ or ‘that’s amazing.’ The reaction you get when something is so different from the expected path that people do not quite have a frame for it yet.
That reaction has not entirely gone away. It comes with the territory of choosing a life that most people have not seen up close.
The years since
We spent our early years across Southeast Asia. Moving slowly, staying weeks and months in each place, building connections with families doing similar things, and figuring out what worldschooling actually looked like in practice.
A pregnancy spent in Thailand, Laos, and Indonesia culminated in a beautiful home birth back in New Zealand. But staying put when we felt like we were just getting going meant our time back ‘home’ was only fleeting!
Colin started the passport application on the day our second daughter was born, and we left New Zealand before she was ten weeks old.
Since then, we have continued to travel through Southeast Asia, Europe (including France, the Balkans, Turkey, and Georgia), South Asia, and back through Australia and New Zealand.
The number of countries or cities has never mattered. It’s the time in them, living as locals, that’s made it a life worth living.
The pandemic arrived in the middle of all of it. But it didn’t stop us from moving.
Carefully, creatively, and with considerably more logistical effort than usual, we kept going. For a family committed to location independence, stopping was never an option.
Now the anniversaries and birthdays rack up, but the journey continues…
Why this website exists
Parenting and Passports started as a way for us to share what we were learning with other families considering the same kind of leap.
But it has grown from there, and now the website exists for all parents asking the same question we were asking back in 2016: what if we tried this?
Between us, we have built a life that has worked for us. We are not here to tell you it is easy, or that it is right for everyone.
But we are still living location-independent lives, and we know you can, too. You just have to make it work FOR YOU.