Originally Posted by
conspiratemus1
In your opening post you finished by saying,
"I know this may well open a can of worms, so I thought I should add that I am not looking for life, financial, or parenting advice. I just want to start a discussion with people who have done something like this, or considered it."
[...and then....]
"Thanks for any input!"
Those two statements are self-contradictory. It's therefore not surprising that you and your responders are starting to get testy. It sounds like the only "input" you want is what validates what you want to do anyway, or stays away from what is really the elephant in the room here: How can being voluntarily homeless to indulge an adult whim possibly be good for your children? No, you don't have to sacrifice everything for your children...but pretty damn close. That's why I'm getting involved here. I couldn't care less what nomads do with their own lives. But part of what you are proposing (the part about selling everything and traveling by bike(s) for a few years with your children, with no fixed address and no roof over their heads), when you have a choice not to, smells like child abuse. And here we all have a responsibility to at least say something -- raising children is not just the parents' call. I would think that if the child protection services of whatever jurisdiction you happened to be wandering through became aware that there were children involved, they would investigate your fitness as parents. Certainly any physician you saw would be obligated, ethically and usually legally, to notify the authorities of even a "spidey-sense" suspicion that the necessities of life weren't being provided to those kids. Please don't let it come to that.
Thus ends my input.
Wow, just wow! Are you kidding?
Child abuse because of traveling with your children? With the means and the option to stop and rent (or buy) a home at any time? So if I kept a rental apartment in my name, would you still consider it child abuse to travel with my children? What about families that travel full time in RVs?
That is a scary world you are living in.