A family sabbatical is not a long holiday. A holiday is a break from your life; a sabbatical is a different one, lived deliberately for a fixed season and then handed back. The distinction matters, because almost everything that goes well or badly about a year away follows from which of the two a family is actually taking.

What the year is for

Parents tend to give one of three reasons, and most give all three by the end of the first call.

The first is time with the children, before the shape of the family changes. There is a stretch — very roughly the primary-school years and a little beyond — when many children are old enough to remember a year abroad and young enough to still want one with you. That window tends to narrow as they grow.

The second is a pause in the adult’s own momentum. A sabbatical is often taken at a hinge: between roles, after a sale, at the end of something that worked. The year is not an escape from the work so much as a place to stand still long enough to see what the next decade should be.

The third is harder to name. Families describe wanting their children to grow up knowing the world is larger and stranger and more generous than the version visible from one town. A year somewhere genuinely different does that in a way a fortnight never can.

“A holiday is a break from your life. A sabbatical is a different one, lived deliberately for a season and then handed back.”

How long it should be

Three months is the shortest stretch that still feels like living rather than visiting. It is long enough to find a rhythm, make a few real friendships, and stop counting the days — and short enough to take without dismantling a career or a school place at home. For many families it is the right answer, and it is the one we built The Reset around.

Twelve months is a different proposition. A year lets children settle into a school properly, learn the language past the polite phrases, and come home changed in lasting ways rather than simply refreshed. It asks more — of the work left behind, of the school at home, of the family’s nerve — and it gives more back. Most families who take a full year describe it afterwards not as the year they went away, but as one of the years that mattered most.

The wrong length is the one chosen to minimise disruption rather than to fit the family. A six-week compromise that satisfies nobody is more disruptive, in the end, than a clean season everyone commits to.

The fears that hold parents back

The children will fall behind. This is the most common worry, and for many families it is not borne out: children who spend a year in a good international school, learning a second language and navigating an unfamiliar culture, often return having gained in the things that are hardest to teach, and settle back into the academic things in time. Much depends on the child’s age and stage, on curriculum continuity, and — for older children — on whether the year falls near major exams, so it is worth taking advice from both the home and the receiving school. The first month is slow, and that slowness frightens parents who expected instant immersion. It passes. We have written separately on what the first month feels like.

The work won’t survive it. Sometimes the honest answer is that a particular role won’t, and the year forces a decision that was coming anyway. More often the work survives perfectly well, because the things that genuinely require presence are fewer than they appear from inside a busy year. A sabbatical is frequently the clarifying instrument that shows which is which.

We’ll come home and regret the cost. Where regret occurs, it tends to come less from the year itself than from the friction of arranging it badly — the visa that went wrong, the villa that wasn’t as promised, the school place that fell through in August. The cost that lingers is often not the financial one but the avoidable stress that can turn a gift into an ordeal.

Where to take it

A sabbatical needs somewhere that is genuinely different from home but not hostile to family life — good schooling within reach, healthcare a family can trust, a culture that welcomes children rather than tolerating them, and enough beauty that the ordinary days are good ones. The destination matters less than the fit; what matters is that the place can carry a year without the family spending the year managing it.

Bali holds a year for a family unusually well, which is why it is where we work. The schools are real, the healthcare is workable, the cost of a household is a fraction of the equivalent at home, and the culture is built around family and ceremony in a way that visiting children feel within weeks. We have written at length on the place itself — the regions, the schools, the rhythms of the island year.

How to spend it well

The families who get the most from a sabbatical tend to do less with it than they expected to. They do not fill the calendar. They let the children be bored long enough to find their own occupations. They keep one or two anchors — a sport, a weekly ceremony, a Sunday ritual — and leave the rest open. The memories that come back are almost never the planned ones.

The other thing they do is decide, early, that the year is allowed to change them. A sabbatical taken with the quiet intention of returning to exactly the life you left is a holiday wearing a longer coat. The ones that matter are taken with the door left open.

What we do

We arrange family sabbaticals in Bali end to end — the school, the visa, the villa, the household, the healthcare and the travel — so that the practical burden is carried by one team and the family can give its attention to the year itself. Whether it is a season or a full year, the work is the same: the major decisions made before the family arrives, and a single team holding all of it once you arrive. If a year away has been the recurring conversation, it begins with a note.

Author: The Annum  ·  Published: May 2026  ·  Last updated: June 2026

— The Annum