In the fall of 2024, our local school district in Delaware moved the mandatory ALICE drills to start in kindergarten, my daughter’s year at the time. These are intense quarterly drills where the school simulates a shooting, training children to hide in case of an active shooting.
My wife and I had talked about world schooling before this, and had a lot of discussions about what would work for our family. We decided it was time for our family to leave.
We moved to Malta
In April, 2025, following four months of intense paperwork, my son and I arrived in Malta as part of the digital nomad approval process. We had never set foot on the islands and honestly knew very little about the country we’d chosen based on internet research. We were there to secure a rental and finalize the paperwork. And two months later, my full family of four had sold nearly every possession, including our house and car. We boarded a plane, with just suitcases in hand.
Courtesy of the author
Life in Malta is very different. And by extension, parenting here is different too. Malta is a tiny archipelago between Sicily and Tunisia. The bulk of the population, including us, lives on the island of Malta, which is a densely populated stretch that feels like a city-state. The country’s population is only a bit over 500,000, but 5 million tourists pass through annually, mostly in the summer.
To some, Malta is a cruise stop. To others, a party destination. It is a country that is remarkably young: having just celebrated its 50th anniversary of independence from Britain. And it is a land that is deeply, deeply old. The second-oldest human freestanding structures are Neolithic temples here on the island. History and modernity combine in every direction.
Parenting in Malta feels different
As a parent, the most obvious difference comes in a feeling of safety. I never worry when my kids are at school. Everywhere we’ve been on the island, whether at a local festa, a beach, or a historic site, we’ve found many other children, and my kids have made many friends.
And for a small island, there’s a remarkable amount to do. Every week seems to host another unique event. There is a wonderful children’s museum, many playgrounds, and of course the sea is everywhere. The Mediterranean itself is not the same ocean we knew in the mid-Atlantic. It is stunningly teal and nearly always warm to swim in.
Courtesy of the author
Parenting in a new continent meant adapting on the go to an entirely new way of life. Everything’s close, but traffic is heavy. We lived car-free entirely for seven months. We quickly adapted to no dryer for our clothes (not too bad with nearly nonstop sun) and recognized some things we took for granted in the US simply don’t exist here (Amazon deliveries and Pumpkin Spice Lattes). Life is slower, with a school year that only starts in October, and summer work is meant to be half-serious, half at the beach.
We have explored and learned so much
On the way back from a prehistoric cave (Ghar Dhalam) filled with pigmy hippo bones, my son turned to me and said: “Dad, I feel so grateful to see the world as we do.”
We have taken family trips to Neolithic temples, walked the kids through the gilded halls of the Baroque masterpiece St John’s Co-Cathedral, where 450 of the Knights of Malta lay entombed, and love the children’s museum Esplora, which is built in what used to be a hospital during the Knights’ Era and WW2. There are shrapnel holes from the war, and it overlooks the walls of Valletta, which we also overlook from our house.
We can walk to Paceville, the party area that feels like mini-Manhattan. We can walk to the sea. And of course, when the kids are good, fresh gelato arrives by delivery. Not ice cream, mind you.
The kids don’t always appreciate it. We returned from the Alps with the kids “bored of mountains” and not caring about returning to the ocean they “always see”. But we appreciate that this is the life they live.
Malta is a different world from the one we left. I don’t know how long we’ll be here, or what other parts of the world await us on our adventure, but I am grateful to be here now, parenting the kids in a way I never imagined.
