After we stopped traveling full-time, our 11-year-old daughter, Brooklyn, became obsessed with her bedroom.
She wanted to repaint it. Rearrange it. Add shelves, plants, posters, and end tables to organize her art supplies. She asked for candles and incense (and permission to burn them).
She pushed back when my wife and I asked her to keep her clothes picked up — not out of laziness, she explained, but because the artist in her liked how it felt to leave things wherever they landed.
At first, this “new normal” bugged me. The requests and pushback felt endless, even erratic, as if we were chasing some moving target of comfort that she would never reach.
Then one night, I walked past her room and was drawn by the scent of vanilla drifting through the crack in the door. Curled up on her bed under a throw, a small reading light on and the warm glow of candlelight around her, she sat reading a hardcover copy of “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
And it finally clicked: After years spent in airports, hotels, and temporary spaces, this was the first place within her control that she could count on staying the same.
At first, a life of travel made sense for our family
My wife and I began traveling the world with our three kids in 2020, at a time when structure had already fallen apart for most families.
School was remote. Routines were fractured. The future felt unpredictable. Travel, oddly enough, felt grounding.
If our kids were going to spend their days on screens anyway, why not replace textbooks with real places? Why not let geography, culture, and shared experience do some of the teaching?
Phil Lockwood
Almost immediately, we began documenting our journey on a new YouTube channel. It was a new direction for the entire family, and the excitement was universal. Our kids even started their own channels and began producing their own episodes.
We juggled the challenges of highlighting the far-flung places we were visiting, the mistakes we were making, and the logistics of pulling off long-term travel as a family of five. Friends and family started watching.
Then strangers, too. Our audience grew into the thousands somewhat slowly, then into the hundreds of thousands surprisingly fast. Soon, we’d reached over half a million YouTube subscribers.
Sharing everything online felt natural at the time. It gave structure to our travels and, through ad revenue and brand sponsorships, helped offset the high costs. And it felt useful—like we were showing other families what was possible if they were willing to step outside the usual script.
Phil Lockwood
In those early years, it felt like so many high-profile family YouTube channels were presented as success stories — adventurous, tight-knit, and inspirational. I didn’t see as much public skepticism, and some darker stories of family vloggers (like Ruby Franke’s) that would later dominate headlines hadn’t yet come to light.
So, at the time, we didn’t see ourselves as taking a risk — we saw ourselves as joining a small but growing group of households who were filming and sharing their lives publicly before the downsides were so widely discussed, documented, and understood.
For a while, it worked. Or, at least it appeared to. The kids were curious. We were together. We saw parts of the world that most families only talk about. And all five of us were enjoying building something meaningful together.
There were real benefits: closeness, adaptability, and perspective. Our kids learned how to navigate unfamiliar places and unfamiliar people. We learned to function as a family without the usual scaffolding of schedules and routines.
What we didn’t yet understand was what those benefits might be trading against.
As time went on, the cracks began to show — and coming home didn’t repair them all
Not all of our kids experienced the lifestyle the same way.
As our youngest and most adventurous, Colt thrived on the endless variety. Reagan, my oldest from a previous marriage, enjoyed the journey, but eventually chose to return to in-person school, and we adjusted our travel around her schedule with her mom. Brooklyn, though, gradually stopped enjoying it altogether.
There wasn’t a dramatic breaking point. It was a slow accumulation: long-haul flights at odd hours, constant activity, museums and cultural experiences designed for adults, not kids. Plenty of stimulation, but very little continuity.
Phil Lockwood
What I didn’t fully appreciate was how much childhood depends on repetition — seeing the same faces, returning to the same places, building friendships that deepen rather than reset with new people every few weeks.
Other nomadic families we met reassured us that this was normal. They told us our kids would grow more worldly, more mature, even more interesting than their peers. That any awkwardness later would be a sign of depth, not loss.
And I wanted to believe that. But as Brooklyn pulled further away from the lifestyle — showing little enthusiasm for new destinations, frustration with red-eye flights, and no desire to highlight her experiences in our episodes — it became harder to ignore the possibility that what we thought was enriching had become simply exhausting for her.
The hardest part wasn’t wondering what she wanted: She was clear that she’d rather be back home, back in school, and back to occasional family vacations. The hardest part was realizing that submitting to her desires would require dismantling a life we had just spent years reorganizing everything around.
Eventually, though — and after five full years of constant travel —we made the decision to stop. We returned to the house that we’d kept in Denver. Reagan graduated and headed to college. Brooklyn enrolled in in-person high school, while Colt chose to continue online for the flexibility. Our pace slowed, and the constant motion ended.
And yes —things got easier. The kids seem more independent than ever. Life feels calmer. There’s a structure where there used to be constant negotiation.
Phil Lockwood
Still, the relief I feel is mixed with doubt.
Brooklyn still carries some resentment about not settling down sooner. She’s now trying to build friendships in a neighborhood where other kids grew up side by side for years. She missed that stretch of middle school — the inside jokes, shared routines, and the quiet accumulation of belonging. I sometimes wonder whether the introversion I see now is simply adolescence, or whether years without steady peer relationships reshaped her in ways we can’t fully undo.
Did the benefits of those experiences outweigh the costs? Did we assume that anything lost along the way would simply return? Or are we just seeing a normal adjustment after an unusual childhood?
I don’t have clean answers. I’ve only accepted that good intentions don’t guarantee harmless outcomes — and that parenting decisions made confidently at the time can look very different in hindsight.
I don’t regret our choice — just parts of the execution
I’m glad we traveled. I’m glad our kids have seen the world. I’m also glad we stopped. I don’t regret the journey my wife and I took our children on, but I no longer assume it was unquestionably right.
If I could do it again? I’d prioritize putting down roots earlier — fewer destinations, more seasons in one place, more chances for the kids to build friendships that weren’t constantly interrupted.
And I’d question whether sharing our adventures online was necessary at all.
Phil Lockwood
There’s a difference between traveling with kids and building a childhood around constant motion — especially when that motion is public.
We still travel, but only a few times a year, mostly around school breaks. Colt still loves going. Brooklyn hasn’t joined a trip since we settled back down; my sisters stay with her when we leave.
Recently, though, she’s started talking about ancient Greece and asking what it would take to see the ruins in person — but we’re careful not to read too much into that since interest isn’t always the same as readiness.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: parenting decisions don’t come with clean verdicts. They come with trade-offs.
Sometimes the most honest stories aren’t about success or failure — they’re about realizing, long after the decision has been made, that you’re still not entirely sure where the line really was.
