Jennie Germann Molz is a thought leader in the sociology of backpacking, travel, and digital nomadism. In her early twenties, she spent two years backpacking around the world. She credits this experience with sparking her academic interest in tourism culture. She went on to earn a Master’s in Popular Culture Studies, focusing on travel imagery, and a Ph.D in Sociology, focusing on tourism mobilities, from Lancaster University in England.

Today, Dr. Germann Molz is a professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research interests include tourism and technology, traveling families, digital nomadism and mobile lifestyles. Dr. Germann Molz’s publications include: Travel Connections: Technology, Tourism and Togetherness in a Mobile World (Routledge) and Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests: Alternative Ontologies for Future Hospitalities (Palgrave Macmillan), and most recently, The World is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling (NYU Press).

We’re so lucky to have caught up with Jennie Germann Molz while she is on sabbatical this year, in her home town of Taos, New Mexico. Like any good journey, our conversation zigged and zagged in fascinating ways. We could have spoken with her for hours. We’re delighted to share with you a synopsis of our conversation as part of our Wonder Year Community Connector series.

Tell us a bit about yourself and what sparked your interest in travel and tourism.

I wish I could remember the exact moment. As a kid, I always wanted to travel the world. I had a very mobile childhood. We moved around a lot, all within the United States. I went to 11 different schools before I graduated from high school. I think that probably embedded some existential questions in me that I could explore through thinking about travel and tourism.

When I was in high school in Dallas, Texas, I became friends with all the study abroad kids who were coming to the US. I think I felt as out of place as they did and I bonded with them over that experience. Then I applied to their study abroad program, AFS (American Field Services), and spent the year after I graduated from high school in Italy.

I did my master’s degree research on travel imagery, and then for my PhD research, I studied the blogs that around-the-world backpackers were publishing while they were traveling. I looked at the narratives on global citizenship that were coming out in those blogs. This was 2000 and 2001, and these blogs were just like personal websites, not the kind of interactive social media landscape we have today. I wanted to understand how backpackers were beginning to use mobile technologies to plan their travels, stay in touch with people, and experience the world. This academic exploration informed my first publication, Travel Connections: Technology, Tourism and Togetherness in a Mobile World. One of the travel bloggers that I interviewed for that book was a dad who was traveling with his wife and his two kids. He was a writer, and his two kids were doing school on the road. That impressed me, and I thought, “Oh, that’s my next project.” That’s kind of the trajectory that got me here.

Your experience/interest in long-term family travel is not just academic. It’s personal. Can you tell us about your family’s epic adventure?

As a sociologist, I was interested in families that were on the move, doing worldschooling, but I did not quite know how to handle the research design. I had developed some online and in-person research methodologies for studying backpackers which I applied to the study of families, but I needed time to conduct the research.

I knew I had a sabbatical coming up in a couple of years, but in the meantime, I applied for and got a Fulbright Fellowship. I took my family to Finland for six months, and we lived in Rovaniemi, which is up on the Arctic Circle. My son, Elliot, was eight at the time, and we took him out of school for the semester and enrolled him in a Waldorf school in Rovaniemi. At the end of that semester, I asked him what he would think about maybe doing a longer-term trip that would be part of my fieldwork. I wasn’t sure what he would say since there had been some ups and downs as he had to make new friends and learn Finnish. He got down from the table and walked into the other room, and I thought maybe he’s not up for it. Then, he came back with a piece of paper and a pencil and was like, “OK, where are we going to go?” He wanted to start writing down all of the places for our trip itinerary.

My son was on board. My husband was on board. And I had this sabbatical coming up. We were able to start saving and planning. Elliot decided he wanted to go to all seven continents. This was not necessary for my fieldwork. I wanted to go to some of the hubs where I knew families were hanging out so I could meet with them and interview them. But you know family travel involves compromise!  So, we planned an itinerary to go to all seven continents. Along the way, I made sure to plug into places like Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I knew I would meet other families. I was able to meet and interview more than a dozen families while we were traveling.

Visiting an elephant sanctuary in Chiang Mai

Your most recent book, The World is Our Classroom is subtitled “Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling.”  Can you explain what extreme parenting is all about?

Well, I will tell you, we can thank the publisher for the book’s subtitle! The subtitle that I wanted was much longer, The World is Our Classroom: Mobile Families, Global Kids, and the Search for the Good Life in Uncertain Times. The question I was asking is how does family life happen on the move? We always think about family life as something that happens at home, so what happens when you’re doing it on the move?

That was my first question. As I started to explore, what I realized was that worldschooling families were embracing uncertainty. Whereas a lot of people see uncertainty as a threat, these worldschooling families saw it as a value add; it was something that they could embrace in order to get their kids ready for what would inevitably be an uncertain future.

What I am thinking about with extreme parenting, and I capture it in one of the chapters titled Fear and Joy, is that modern parenting falls along this continuum with helicopter parents at one extreme and free-range parents at the other extreme. The helicopter parents are extremely involved in their kids’ lives and extremely invested in monitoring, securing, and making sure that their kids are safe. Free-range parents, and I think almost all of the worldschooling parents I interviewed and many that I know about, probably situate themselves closer to the free-range parenting philosophy, are at the other extreme. Their emphasis is on giving kids freedom and fostering in them a sense of independence. We can also think about the two extremes as safety versus freedom.  When I talk about extreme parenting, I’m thinking about the way parents calculate that tradeoff.

What I realized with these extremes is that they circle back to the same place. All of these parents want the same thing for their kids, right? They want their kids to have happy, successful lives in a world that is full of uncertainty and kind of falling apart. Depending on how you think about it, climate change, political polarization, the rise of extremist politicians, volatility in the global economy – that can be really scary. So these parents are looking at this future and thinking, “How do I get my kid ready for that? Do I keep them on the straight and narrow path and make sure that they go to college, get a degree, get a good job and stay in the middle class; or, do I equip them with a sense of self-reliance and resilience and fluency in three languages and the ability to communicate with people who are different from them and the capacity to cope with change?” None of these parents have bad intentions; they all want a good future for their kids. They are just coming at it from different perspectives.

In our book Wonder Year, the blog on our website, articles, etc., we three coauthors contemplate how family dynamics change when families are in motion. You have deep expertise in mobile living. Can you help us understand a little more about the science/sociology underlying that phenomenon?  In other words, what is it about travel and being in motion that makes being a family so different on the road than it is at home?

Curiosity is a mindset. It can happen right here at the kitchen table. Travel is not the only way to cultivate curiosity and by the same token, travel won’t necessarily spark it either. I engage with a model called “transformative learning.” This is a model proposed by Jack Mezirow. The idea is that you have a learning experience that shifts you from one world view into a different world view or that shifts you from one world view into understanding that there are many, many, many worldviews.

The idea of transformative learning is primarily applied to adult learning, but I think the transformative learning model can apply with kids as they are building their world view. The very first step is some kind of disorienting dilemma; something has to happen to challenge your worldview, like you may grab the sink faucet that you think is cold, and you turn it on, and the water comes out hot. “That is not what I thought was gonna happen! What’s going on here?” There’s some kind of disorienting dilemma, and from there, you have self-reflection about what didn’t meet your assumptions. Then you challenge your own assumptions. “Why did I assume that in the first place? How did I learn that that’s how the world works in the first place?” And then you begin to recognize that there are other worldviews or that there are many ways of living in and making sense of the world. There are other steps to transformative learning, but it all starts with one big disorienting dilemma, which then catalyzes those other steps toward transformative learning. So I wonder if that’s what’s going on with mobility. When we’re traveling, there are always disorienting dilemmas, and there’s constant problem-solving, so maybe that’s one way to think about it.

You interviewed a lot of past and current travelers about their choice to pack it up and hit the road. What were some surprising findings in your research?

I was expecting to write a book that was an account of how people did family life on the move. What I ended up writing was something a little bit different, which is about how these parents were grappling with uncertainty. They were going from a more practical set of questions (How do we handle the logistics of traveling with kids?) to a more existential set of questions (How do we prepare our children to thrive in an unpredictable world?). The other thing that really surprised me is how many of the families, and this happened with my family as well, shifted to unschooling once they were on the road. You plan, plan, plan for all the lessons and learning materials and academic outcomes, and then a few weeks in you realize your kid does not want to write an essay and there’s a plane or train or bus you’ve gotta catch and you’re like “Oh well, forget about that assignment and just learn whatever you’re learning. Just look around! How do we buy tickets? Can you calculate that exchange rate? How can you figure out what time our bus leaves?” It’s definitely a philosophical shift, but I think it’s also partly a logistical shift. Unschooling just dovetails with the realities of travel so much better than carrying a bunch of textbooks and standardized lesson plans around.

I also expected that the families I interviewed, most of whom were from the middle class and the global north, would have more progressive values. What I found was unexpected. A lot of these families were leaning more toward libertarian values. They justified their decision to worldschool in terms of “This is what’s best for my family,” or “This is what’s best for my kid,” and sometimes there was not a whole lot of thought about the communities that they’ve left behind, or about investing in public education in their home towns. It felt like a lot of these people were adopting worldschooling as a personal strategy to deal with what are actually collective problems. That kind of surprised me. But I also found that these families are so incredibly smart and skillful and resilient as families. I think they have the tools to make a big impact on some of these collective problems. Maybe I was hitting them at a point in their journey where it was just about their kids. I have not followed up with any of the families, so I am not sure about how they processed their experiences or if they were finding ways to use these tools to deal with collective problems more collaboratively. I am not sure.

Is it fair to say that you think the world is not only an excellent teacher, but that it’s the best classroom? What makes you come to that decisive conclusion?

I would not say that is my conclusion, but that is the belief that I found among the parents I interviewed. The belief that the world is the best classroom motivated them to make radical decisions about their lives, to quit a salaried job or sell their home, and to take their kids out of traditional schooling. I don’t disagree with them, but I am also hesitant to celebrate travel as the best or only way to learn.

Travel alone does not expand kids’ worldviews in a positive way. There’s nothing magic about it. You have to have parents who are open and who play an active role in opening up the learning opportunities presented through travel. You know, research has shown that travel can also reinforce stereotypes. It can reinforce a sense of entitlement and superiority that narrows a worldview. So, I think that it’s really important not to romanticize travel by itself but to keep it in conjunction with some of these other conditions and to recognize that parents play a big role in the broader outcomes.

It really depends, too, on what we mean by the world, and what you’re experiencing as the world when you say something like the world is your classroom. We need to remember that every place you go is somebody else’s local place. That’s somebody’s home. When we’re talking about the world, we’re really talking about all these places that are somebody’s home, which means that our home is also the world, right? That’s why I like saying, wherever you are is just as good a place to start worldschooling as any other place because we’re all in the world.

One of the most profound types of learning during long-term family travel is when kids acquire life skills. You coined a phrase “emotional curriculum.” I think we may be talking about the same thing. Can you talk more about “emotional curriculum?”

I had a whole curriculum for Elliot before we left on our travels. I had promised the superintendent of his school district that he would come back knowing this, this, and this. I had downloaded so many books on the Kindle! And then we got started, and it was hard to stay on track. For his social studies curriculum, he was studying the history of Mashpee Wampanoag Indigenous culture in Massachusetts. But he was working on that unit while we were in Australia. It didn’t make sense. I wondered why he was not reading about Australian Indigenous culture. Eventually, the curriculum we had crafted just disintegrated, and we moved into unschooling mode to take advantage of the cues and experiences around us. I realized that a lot of the parents I was interviewing and talking to were doing this as well.

They would tell me things like: “Ok, so my kid can’t name all of the US presidents in chronological order, but they can order seven different flavors of gelato in Italian.” Or “They’re struggling with long division, but they just played with a kid for two hours, and they don’t even speak the same language.” Or “My son isn’t that interested in chemistry, but he is learning how to cope with change.” It was like the fact that kids were learning all of these life lessons and emotional skills was a justification for what kids weren’t mastering in the standard academic curriculum.

What I also realized was that, in parents’ minds, some emotions count as life lessons and some don’t. There was a lot of emphasis on positive emotions: resilience, independence, empathy, compassion, gratitude, these kinds of things. But parents were not as forthcoming when talking about disgust, embarrassment, or when their kids get grossed out by things. They didn’t talk a whole lot about homesickness. I started to dig a little bit deeper into what was included in the emotional curriculum and what was being left off. What I theorized, in the end, is that these emotional skills really add up to an emotional curriculum of global citizenship. A lot of the parents explicitly say, “We’re going on this trip because I want my kids to become global citizens.” It is a noble goal, but what does that mean?  Citizenship is technically a codification of rights and responsibilities – voting, paying taxes, being part of the social contract – but that’s not how we think about global citizenship. With global citizenship, we mostly talk about it in terms of feelings, not in terms of paying taxes.

What I found was that these parents were really using the emotional curriculum to teach their kids how to feel global. And that’s why feelings like compassion, empathy, tolerance for difference, ability to cope with change, and resilience became far more important than maybe admitting that your child was disgusted or grossed out when they saw something upsetting, like someone living in abject poverty or when they were intolerant of something. That’s what I’m getting at with the emotional curriculum of life lessons and emotional skills and competencies that stand in for some of the academic outcomes. It’s a way of feeling global, and it’s also a way of equipping kids with the emotional skills they’re probably going to need in the future, like being able to work with people who are different from you. Or being able to use technology to stay in touch with friends could translate into using technology to collaborate on a group project or something. It was really about the here and now and also about the future.

Visiting a chinstrap penguin colony in Antarctica as part of our family’s seven-continent itinerary

Finally, do you have any thoughts to share with folks who might be on the fence or afraid of taking the leap? What do you tell people when they come up to you and ask Should I go? Should I do this? Is it good for my kids?

My worry is that people are motivated by FOMO (fear of missing out). Social media is full of these images of kids and parents frolicking on the beach or strolling through quaint villages, and the kids are learning how to count to ten in another language or how to make chocolate from cocoa pods. And when you see this, you might think to yourself, “Oh no, what if my kid isn’t learning how to do that?” I think the social media landscape has ratcheted up the expectations for parenting, and I think that it’s very easy to get caught up in it.

So maybe this will be an unpopular opinion, but I would tell them, “If you want to do it, do it, and if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it.” There are a lot of reasons not to do it. There are a lot of reasons to do it. Many worldschooling parents talk about cultivating roots and wings, and they’re both incredibly valuable. I’m not urging anybody to go, and I’m not judging anyone for doing it or for not doing it. If you have the resources to worldschool your kid, if you can do it, and if your kid wants to do it, that’s fantastic. If not, don’t feel bad about it. Invest the resources that you do have into making your child’s community and home and their school a nurturing, wonderful place to be. Where I am right now in my life, my philosophy is the grass is greener where you water it.

Jennie’s book, The World Is Our Classroom, is available anywhere books are sold. We highly recommend it!

The post Community Connectors: Jennie Germann Molz  appeared first on Wonder Year Travel.

We are honored that Florence endorsed our book, Wonder Year. We consider her a friend and mentor and are delighted to have had the chance to sit down with Florence for a conversation about some of our favorite topics: nature, awe, travel, and wonder. All these topics are also front and center for family travel and worldschooling. Here is a recap of that fascinating and informative conversation. 

Tell us a bit about yourself and what sparked your interest in being a science writer.

I have always been interested in environmental topics, and in college, I started the student environmental group and environmental newspaper. I was interested in the convergence of journalism and environmental stories, some of which involved a lot of science. Then, out of college, I got hired by High Country News, a wonderful environmental magazine. Progressively, I got more interested in science stories, and not just classic stories about deforestation, pollution, what’s happening with a proposed mine, … but how these situations are playing out in our human bodies. To understand what was happening in our bodies, I had to learn more about topics like biology, cell physiology, and endocrinology. The more I learned, the more I geeked out and thought this was an underreported area of journalism. 

Then I became interested, not only in how the environment hurts our bodies but also in how it can help our bodies. 

In Your book, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Healthier, Happier and More Creative you examine the science behind why nature is good for us. Can you explain what’s going on? 

There’s a lot of emerging research on multiple levels. Because of advances in field technology, we can see what’s happening, for example, to people’s brain waves when they are outside in nature. There are more innovative ways to study human physiology outside and that has helped spur a lot of this work. 

What we are seeing is, even after just 15 or 20 minutes of being in a pleasant outdoor environment, people’s bodies shift into a state of greater calm. Their nervous systems go into a place of parasympathetic where their respiration slows down, heart rates may slow down, and stress hormones decrease. That was really impressive and surprising to me–that we can see those changes in just 15 minutes. 

Researchers today are looking at many different elements. What happens when we hear birdsong? What happens when we smell amazing compounds that trees emit? There’s research showing that they increase certain immune cells. Who would have thought that? One researcher, an immunologist I met with in Japan, found that our killer T cells, a type of immune cell that can kill infected or cancerous cells, increase 30% after a walk in the woods and stay highly elevated for a week or longer. All of these different sensory systems are being studied to explain why we feel so good outside. 

Also, if you look at the large-scale epidemiological studies you see some really impressive data. There seems to be a relationship between just living near green space and living longer and being healthier. These results are the same after adjusting for income. So, there is a measurable health boost for living near green space. 

Can you tell us about the effect of nature specifically on children, on young brains? 

I was really fortunate to spend some time in forest preschools in Scandinavia where up to one in ten kids attends a forest preschool. The data emerging from these settings show these kids have healthier microflora inside their bodies. That means they have stronger immune systems – less asthma, less skin disease, and fewer colds and viruses. We know that these kids, by the time they get to the conventional schools, are a little bit behind their peers on reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they catch up within a couple of years. And, they are ahead of their peers and they stay ahead of their peers on all kinds of really important, but softer, measures like self-regulation, self-confidence, ability to work together in teams, conflict resolution, leadership, innovation, self-discovery, self-learning. These are life skills that, unfortunately, so many kids lack today.

We know that our young brains are designed to learn through exploration . And that’s the really fun thing about being outside. You are not giving a kid a pencil and paper and telling her exactly what to do with it. They are roaming around and they’re finding things. Nature is always changing. There are different birds moving through. There are different water levels, changing weather. One day there is going to be ice across the creek and you can stick your foot in it and you can make cool cracking noises and then see amazing fractal patterns. You can watch the snowflakes land on the pine trees. There’s changing light. After a big storm, there’s the opportunity to collect cool leaves and twigs that have fallen. Kids outside follow their curiosity. What a beautiful way to learn. 

I think being in nature, being outside, teaches us to look and to feel what it’s like to be a sensing animal. And it turns out, our bodies and our nervous systems really like that. 

One of the amazing things about travel is how easy it is to spend time outside, in nature, to be unplugged, to be self-directed. And there’s a lot of research that points to the benefits of travel. What are your thoughts on the benefits of traveling with kids? 

We know kids and all humans are drawn to novelty. That’s one of the problems with cell phones. We can always find something new and interesting to pull us in on a cell phone. So you have to compete with that by providing some novelty, some excitement, by stimulating curiosity, allowing dopamine to flow. We know that travel does that. It pulls us out of what’s familiar. It makes us pay attention and observe. It enables us to experience the joy of discovery. When that happens it can also pull us out of our own negative thoughts that we all experience, including children. Some kids are more ruminative than others, but I think we can all identify with this notion of seeing something novel and beautiful and all of a sudden we’re back in the world and engaged in things outside of our own heads. We know from the research that this leads to emotional resilience in people. 

Another important thing about travel is that we can adapt to becoming a little bit comfortable with discomfort. We’ve heard the term helicopter parent, but there’s also the term “bulldozer parent” where we are erasing all the friction in our kids’ paths. We want them to be comfortable every second. That is not real life. That is not setting them up to handle when things go a little bit awry. Being in a new place, there are discomforts all over the place. There may be foods you don’t like or weather happening you don’t like. Travel innoculates kids to be able to handle, accept, and roll with these discomforts. 

Recently you have written a lot about awe. Can you break down why awe is such a powerful phenomenon? 

There are so many reasons. We’ve talked about the novelty aspect and when we see something beautiful it pulls us out of our own heads. But what also happens when we see something vast, whether it’s the Milky Way or a wild animal or even just the idea or the concept – like asking ourselves, “why do the colors in the sunset look the way they do?”- in those moments we feel a little bit less self-involved, a little bit less self-important. We feel more connected to the world around us. And the science shows we also feel more connected to each other. So awe is a really powerful antidote to things like loneliness and anxiety that are so prevalent among young people today. 

We used to see the Milky Way all the time. We used to encounter wild animals, see the sunset every night, sit around the fire and sing songs, experiencing collective awe. I think today we are awe-deprived as a culture. This is another reason it is important to bring children into the natural world.

How can we, as modern people, as modern parents get more awe in our lives?   

First, we need a more generous understanding of what awe is. Awe is not necessarily the Grand Canyon or the top of a mountain, or a narwhal whale under our kayak. Instead, we can find astonishing moments of beauty if we are open to looking for them. When we are out walking, we can remind or cue ourselves to be mindful by asking, “What am I noticing right now?” “What birds am I hearing?” “What plants are coming out?” “What’s the sky doing right now?” “What am I smelling?” These are really simple cues that will help ground us in the present moment. 

We can do this regularly, even if we can’t get outside every day, we can cue ourselves with, “Why is this soup so beautiful?” “Look at these colors in my house plant” And the amazing thing is that this trains us to be open to beauty. So, it’s a practice, and you can practice it every day with simple, ordinary things. This practice is a way to savor, appreciate, and step outside of ourselves a little bit. 

You’re also a badass outdoorswoman. You kayak and canoe, hike, ski, backpack, take epic solo trips, and put yourself way, way out there. Can you talk about what you’ve learned from these expeditions and how adventure has shaped your identity? 

I love it that you think I am a badass but really I am not. I used to try to keep up with all of the guys and experts and at some point I realized it’s so much fun out there even if you’re not an expert. So we can give ourselves permission to not be great at everything and still get a lot out of the experience. I think that’s a wonderful metaphor for life.

I also think that a little bit of adventure, especially for women, is really important because there are studies showing that girls who participate in adventure sports have more self-confidence. They are a little more focused for one thing, in this day and age, on how their bodies work and how strong and competent they are and that they can acquire skills and mastery instead of thinking about how their bodies look, which is the dominant driver on social media right now. We need to counteract those messages and I don’t think there’s any better way to do it than sports and outdoor adventure. 

After my divorce, my self-esteem bottomed out and one of the things that really helped me find joy again was mountain biking. I found myself riding down this mountain and giggling. I had a huge authentic smile on my face for the first time in months. And I had a sense that I am a brave, competent person and I am going to be ok. For me, adventure sports helped me access that. 

Florence leading one of her nature retreats

Finally, you are also a parent to two amazing children, ages 19 and 22, right? What advice do you have for parents of young children to set their kids on the path of discovery, health, and creativity? 

I noticed that whenever there was inter-sibling conflict, when the kids went outside it immediately dissipated. I think that’s a great thing to remember even if you are not traveling. Unstructured play is just amazing and my kids would instead of fight, delight in each other’s discoveries. 

I also found that, especially with my daughter, it was important to have other kids around that she could connect with outside. We would often travel with other families and that connection seemed to be a mood booster without fail. 

Another big tip is food. We would always have snacks around. Kids need to eat. They need protein. If they get hangry, it’s all over. There’s so much more to share on this topic but I’ll leave it at these three general pointers. 

If people want to learn more about you, your work, your books, retreats and other events, where can they go to learn more? 

It’s very easy, I have a website – www.florencewilliams.com. There are links there to various social channels, books, audio programs, upcoming events, and retreats that I lead in wild places. 

Here’s a great book trailer of Florence’s book, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Healthier, Happier and More Creative.

Florence also recently wrote the PEN-Award winning HEARTBREAK: A Personal and Scientific Journey. She regularly hosts small retreats for people who want to explore or have a need to focus on writing, healing, or relationships. 

Florence’s most recent books will change the way you think about your family’s time in nature.

The post Community Connectors: Florence Williams appeared first on Wonder Year Travel.