Ashley Colby: How I Took a Working Parent Sabbatical
In her 20s, environmental sociologist Ashley Colby spent some time nannying for a wealthy Chicago family. The parents were successful by traditional measures, but they rarely saw their children.
The experience was one that galvanized Ashley.
She and her husband then planned what can only be described as a “working parent sabbatical” to ensure they would both be fully present for the young lives of their future children.
Three kids later, the family moved to Uruguay and built a house on land they had purchased years earlier. There, the low cost of living allowed Ashley and her husband to parent nearly full-time until all of their children were older than four.
We cover…
…why she moved her entire family to Uruguay for years and how she planned such a bold move.
…what it looks like to live your life intentionally.
…how accepting Americans have become of not seeing their kids.
…the right time to take a sabbatical with your kids.
…why young parents should deprioritize work.
You’ll enjoy Ashley’s story if you…
…don’t have kids yet, but want to ensure you can still travel and be adventurous as a parent.
…don’t identify with the “busy working parent” archetype.
…would like to find a way to spend more time with your family.
…are considering homeschooling.
You moved from Chicago to Uruguay and took part-time remote work to raise your kids in their early lives. How did you arrive at this version of a sabbatical?
I think people are not intentional enough with their lives. They get caught on whatever path is expected of them, and don't ask themselves, “What do I want out of my life as a whole? What are my goals for my life? What do I want out of this particular period of my life?”
I have three kids now who are 11, 8, and 4. Before we even had kids, my husband and I had various experiences that kind of informed us having this conversation about our sabbatical.
I was a nanny for most of my young adulthood. And when I was nannying, I got a crash course in how different families set up their home economies. There were a lot of wealthier families who you would think were on the highest end of success, but they never saw their kids.
There was one very wealthy family where the mom was in real estate and the dad was in finance in Chicago. They had two nannies. They had a full-time nanny that came from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. I was the nanny from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and then 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. — because that other nanny had kids in daycare who she had to pick up and drop off.
So then I'm just thinking about the cascading effects of this other nanny having to put her kids in daycare to be able to care for this other parent's children. I had no children yet, but I watched as these children weren't even awake when their parents left and they were about to go to sleep when their parents came home.
They had access to all the greatest extracurriculars and best schools. But almost no relationship with their parents.
That was a radicalizing realization. If you're the highest echelon of success in our society, this is what you do. So I was like, “Whatever it takes, I'm not going to do that.”
With my husband I said, “Let's make an intentional decision here.” Could we live abroad? What could we do in this period? And how can we go somewhere where the cost of living is low enough that we don’t have to work these crazy jobs? We both agreed that being around our kids when they're little is really important.
I've seen the highest echelons of success and it doesn't seem that much more meaningful than being able to spend time with your kids.
On the farm in Uruguay
Are you saying some people … sleepwalk into that? That they're not making a conscious decision?
There's a lot of important downstream effects of this kind of striver culture where success means status and money, as opposed to success being the growth of my children and how they're raised.
That's another form of success that has existed in human history. We just don't prioritize it right now. A lot of people think they have a rational technocratic approach to child rearing. Like “the studies say that this is probably fine that I don't spend time with them.”
No, there are no studies that say it's fine.
Some pushback would be that the high status job and money allows me more freedom with my kids.
I've never in my life made a massive amount of money, and I couldn't imagine thinking I needed it. Teaching yourself what you need, versus what is super comfortable, is important early in life. Probably even more important than ramping up all your earnings is learning how to live frugally, because you're going to need that your whole life if you want freedom of time.
The knowledge you have lived on much less than you are now can be comforting.
Right, I would survive, my family would survive. Some of my fondest memories are in our Uruguay house. We don't have running water yet, we don't have electricity yet. And we're kind of camping in the house with camp stoves and flashlights in sleeping bags. My fondest memories were the “toughest” material times, but they were really fun.
Do you think there are people who earnestly do want to prioritize work and career? That they have thought about it and said “this is worth it to me and the opportunities it affords us”?
That's a really tough moral area. I am pretty libertarian in the sense that I think people should do whatever makes sense for them. But I have very strong opinions about what I did.
There is an extreme acceptance of “I just don't feel like being with my newborn and therefore I'm entitled to do whatever I want, no matter what kind of responsibilities I have.” And I just think that’s actually kind of immoral when you think about it.
I'm curious how gender and gender roles play into how you approach this kind of approach to your life.
Yeah, I think about that a lot.
One, I think now having nursed three babies, moms make milk. Babies know the mom smell; they do need mom more physically than dad. The dad can step in, but it's just not the same.
For the mother, this isn't a burden. This is empowerment. It is amazing that I can do this with my body and that the baby needs me so much.
Right now, my four-year-old is … there is nothing more pure in the world than the love of a toddler for their mom. They want to be with you all the time and they just love you so unconditionally and it's lovely, you know?
Having said that, I think right now the way things are set up, it is so isolating for moms alone. In the past it would be groups of children, groups of women. But since we don't have that, I think husbands are a great substitute, but they just work better with the older kids in my opinion.
Do you ever think of what you and your husband sacrificed in regards to career earnings, accolades, things like that? How do you have comfort in this decision that is uniquely you guys?
I don't ever second guess it. I'll never regret the time we got to spend in Uruguay and teach our kids Spanish and learn how to live off the land. It was just such a wonderful period in our lives.
Now we're back in Chicago. We're back in the grind. We’re back in the life of two full-time jobs. The kids are at school. Everybody's up. Everybody's doing stuff.
The sabbatical is over. And so now I'm just like, “Do I regret doing this?” Because the other life was so peaceful. It was so wonderful. But I think it was the right call.
Why did you come back if the sabbatical was so rewarding?
The sabbatical was always supposed to be for when we have kids under three. So we're out of the period where we have any infants at home. The oldest was starting to get to the age where adapting to Uruguayan culture in middle school and high school would have been a bold choice. It would ground her entire cultural context in Uruguay.
There was starting to be some cultural strain. I love Uruguayan culture, but we're Americans. It's a different culture. There were starting to be some identity questions. Is she Uruguayan or American? So as that was happening and our youngest was no longer a baby, we knew it was time to come back.
When I talk to parents who are considering doing some version of what you've done, there's often a concern about returning home. There is a fear that the community of people they used to be a part of aren't there anymore. Do you think maybe those fears are misplaced?
My husband and I are both from the same neighborhood in Chicago. And we came back once a year, usually for at least a month. So our children could maintain a connection to the United States, whether or not we decided to stay in Uruguay.
My oldest had a whole friend group in Uruguay and grew up with them since the time that she was a toddler. Now she's got a great friend group back in Chicago and she's making new friends, but it's not perfectly easy.
Speaking as a sociologist, if we had an option to do our kind of sabbatical in the U.S., and still have some ability for both of us to stay home, we would. It's just that the cost of living is so much higher. It's not possible.
There's trade-offs. Learning Spanish and having nine acres and chickens and a little farm and a homestead and that kind of thing was such a cool experience too. Switching where you live mid-childhood is always tough, but, my hope is that it will also teach them some resilience for life, you know?
What is some of the less obvious advice you have for people who want to do this?
A few things. One is that timing is important. I met this one Australian family in Uruguay. And they moved there when their kids were teens and adolescents. I think it was really, really painful, really painful at that age to have them in a foreign school taught in a foreign language.
If you can start thinking about your life and seasons, there's no hard and fast rule for anyone. But I think it was really painful and will probably live in the memory of those kids as a very painful experience. The timing really matters.
The second point is that you should throw yourself into your new community. You can homeschool but if you do that, are you really a part of your new community? Or are you just isolating your children?
I really, really enjoyed being fully all in on the community, going to the community schools, going to all the community events, making a bunch of friends there, and being fully submerged in the culture.
And lastly, also on timing, ideally you're having this conversation in your twenties or at least before you get married. We bought our land in 2012 and didn't go until 2016. We had a period of time where we bought the land, had intentions to move, and then decided to get pregnant once we had a plan. We had to save up enough money. It takes a long time to manage these things and to move internationally.
There's a theme to what you're describing, which is intentionality, right? Nothing's perfect. There are trade-offs.
Yeah, do it on purpose. If you're past the season where you can take your kids and you're annoyed with American culture and you wish you spent more time with your kids…. When they are 15 might not be the best time to uproot them at that point.
At that point, maybe you need to consider taking family vacations where you spend more time together and you just take mini-sabbaticals. There's not only one way to rekindle these family moments.
We happen to be in such an amazing period of our kids' lives from 4 to 11. They're so fun at this age. Every summer we're doing a million things together as a family. We're taking family vacations where we're going to go see Yellowstone. We're going to go to Yosemite. We're going to give them those magical experiences because this is only a short window where they're gonna go with us and we can show them the world.
Let's talk about FIRE [Financially Independent, Retire Early], which you’ve mentioned in your previous writing as your gateway to this sabbatical. I would love it if you could just walk through your kind of mental journey from there to here.
I think part of the FIRE thing appeals to a type of guy who wants to gamify everything. And so they think, “I'm going to make all this money and then I'm going to be free.”
But they're not really being that intentional, because they're kind of just following the guru who is communicating an almost Christian ethos, that they are going to struggle and then reach heaven.
We should instead have a much healthier approach to work. Think of it more as a vocation and not something that's only a means to an end of making money before you get to be free from the chains of it.
Work is not bondage. If at all possible, build a vocation that's meaningful and something you want to be doing with your time. Obviously, you have to mix that with something you can make money doing.
When you read these stories of people who have “FIRE’d” you see that people don't really know what to do with their time. The ultimate wealth is freedom of time. What are you doing with that time?
I enjoy the concept of mini retirements, as opposed to, retiring early. Take a mini retirement for something. Write a book, take care of your little kids, take care of an elderly parent. There are periods of time in our lives where we have extra work responsibilities and we don't have time to attend to them.
Save up the money, make everything else work that you're required to do to be able to go away, and then go and take your sabbatical. The whole idea of a sabbatical is from academia, where you have a book you want to research. You need to have an output.
In my case, the output was infants that were with their mother for seven years. The output is human beings, which, what else is there?
Something that I bristle against when people talk about retirement, sabbaticals, or FIRE, is this kind of nihilism or cynicism around the idea of labor and work, the idea that it is never a good use of your time.
We have a weird and disordered conception of what work is, because we only think of things that are wage labor as work. The work of my life in a holistic sense, including the care of my children, including taking care of my home, and including things I get paid for. That's all part of the vocation of my life and they go together and complement each other.
Is there anything else about your journey you wanted to touch on?
We talked a little bit about it, but I'm very much of the opinion that people, mothers especially, are expected to kind of ignore their own biology. It would be nice if there were some kind of top-down structure in place that allowed mothers to be with their babies more.
But it would also be really wonderful if the culture didn't encourage women to think, “this is such a burden on me. This is so scary that it's happening to my body.”
Instead it should be, “I'm creating human life and nourishing human life. This is such a joy that I'm able to do this.” It wasn't really until my third baby where I was like, “my gosh, I am enjoying this so much. The baby is so wonderful.”
Both of us think about the power in dad and mom both being in the room when all three of them walked, which never happens now.
There's just not anything that can replace those moments. That's why I was willing to upend our entire lives to build something that made that possible.
I don't care what it takes. I'm not working from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. away from my kids. I'm just not going to do it. And so I was just totally pigheaded. I'm doing this. And then I did it. This is one of the most wonderful things I could have ever done for my family and my own enjoyment in life.