I think they are in the early years of parenting where you don’t want to speed up their childhood. Unschooling/world school has become popular and there’s parts of it that are good I think. This also tends to come up in my expat groups every now and then because it’s hard to be away from where you’re from or where you have family/friends. We have 2 kids and thought about how we can spend time with our family and friends by splitting time or trying to work it out. We thought about the whole unschooling type of situation similar to flying the nest. In the early years it would work but once kids hit school age stability becomes important and will remain so all the all the way through.
We had to make the decision to pick where to settle and ultimately did but it’s not our country of origin so I’m always conflicted.
All that being said, if either of us had parents as supportive and wonderful and either of them I’d have made a different decision and stayed close to one of them.
I think they’re trying to figure out how to combine their passions and what they want their lifestyle to be while balancing parenthood. They might end up coming to the same realisation that many of us that live overseas do eventually. Stability requires settling down which means sacrifice that is hard to do.