The Instagram version of working while traveling with kids: laptop on a beach, sunset behind the screen, child happily building a sandcastle in soft focus. The actual version: a stand-up call at 3pm local time, your seven-year-old asking for snacks, an unreliable wifi router, and a kitchen that has somehow filled with sand again.
This is a real article about how it actually goes, written from three years of running cohorts where almost every parent works full-time. The good news is that it works. The honest news is that it works because of structure, not vibes.
What a real working day looks like in a cohort
A typical Tuesday at Aterra or Casa Sumapaz, for a working parent:
- 7:00 to 8:00. Wake up, coffee, maybe a swim or a slow start. The cohort doesn't open with anything mandatory.
- 8:00 to 9:00. Group breakfast. Not required, but most people show up. This is the soft connection moment.
- 9:00 to 12:00. Parent work block. Kids are with the educator in Cohli Kids. The cohort has a designated quiet zone (a coworking room or a shaded outdoor area). Headphones, calls, deep work.
- 12:00 to 1:00. Group lunch. Conversation. The day's first real pause.
- 1:00 to 3:30. Second work block. Kids in the second half of their program, or with rest time / supervised play. Some parents nap. Some power through.
- 3:30 onwards. Cohort opens up. Parents emerge from work. Kids are out. The day's social half begins.
That gives a working parent roughly five and a half focused work hours, five days a week. It is enough for most remote roles. It is not enough for parents who routinely work 60-hour weeks, and we say so plainly during the application.
How parents protect their work blocks
The thing that makes this rhythm function is the social agreement around work hours. Everyone on the cohort knows that mornings and early afternoons are work time. People do not knock on doors. The kids are genuinely held by the program, not informally watched while parents try to fit a call in around them.
The facilitator helps reinforce this in week one, when the rhythm is still being learned. By week two, it runs itself. By week three, you stop noticing it.
What helps further: the building or property is usually large enough to physically separate work and play. The kids' program operates in one zone. The coworking happens elsewhere. Sound carries less than you'd think.
Time zones and the meeting problem
This is the genuine constraint, not the structure. If you work primarily with US East Coast colleagues and you're at Aterra in Portugal (5 hour offset), your work day shifts. Your morning is theirs at sunrise. Your afternoon block is their morning. By 6pm local you might be on a call.
Most working parents in our cohorts handle this in one of two ways:
- Pre-negotiate with their team for the cohort month. "I will be on East Coast time afternoon and evening. Mornings I'm offline." Most teams accept this; the hardest part is just asking.
- Choose cohort locations strategically. Casa Sumapaz in Colombia is in the Eastern time zone, so for US-based families the day looks identical to working from home. Aterra in Portugal puts you ahead of US colleagues, but it works well for European-based families who would otherwise be on the same time zone anyway.
For Asia-Pacific colleagues: it gets harder regardless of location. We've had families work it out, but it usually means evening calls, and evenings are when the cohort socializes. There's no free lunch on time zones.
When work goes sideways
Sometimes a deadline lands in the middle of week two. Sometimes a kid gets sick on a day you have a presentation. Sometimes the wifi has a bad afternoon (occasional, mostly fine).
What we have observed across cohorts: the families who handle work emergencies best are the ones who lean into the village rather than tough it out alone. Another parent will watch your kid for an hour. The facilitator will move dinner back fifteen minutes so you can finish a call. The chef knows you missed lunch and saves you a plate.
This is the part that is genuinely different from working from home. At home, when something goes sideways, you're alone with it. In a cohort, you're inside a small village, and the village absorbs some of the shock.
The most important thing we've learned about work during cohorts: parents who arrive thinking they need to perform "normal work" while everything around them is changing tend to burn out by week two. The parents who arrive ready to adjust their work intensity slightly downward, because they know they'll get something else back from the experience, finish their cohort more rested than they started.
What you give up
Honest list:
- Some flexibility. If your job requires unpredictable, late-night meetings or last-minute travel, a cohort may be a hard fit.
- The very last hour of focus you might squeeze out at home. The cohort day has a softer edge than most home offices. If your output requires 9 grinding hours daily, this isn't it.
- Total privacy. Even working in the dedicated coworking space, you're a person known to other people. That cuts both ways: it can be more grounding, or it can be more friction, depending on temperament.
What you gain
Also honest:
- Your kids actually see you work. Not as a parent who disappears into a home office, but as a person doing something meaningful that they vaguely understand.
- Real lunch conversations. With other parents who happen to be doing interesting work in entirely different fields. Some of our families have ended up collaborating professionally after a cohort. None of them planned it.
- The end of "is the kid being watched right now?" anxiety. The educator handles the program. You handle work. The cognitive load drops in a way that is hard to describe until you've felt it.
- Sunset. You stop work because the cohort stops. You eat dinner. You sit outside. Most working parents have lost this rhythm; cohorts return it.
If your work is in transition
About half the parents in our 2026 cohorts are in some kind of professional shift: leaving a job, starting a venture, taking sabbatical, moving from full-time to consulting. Cohorts work surprisingly well as a quiet container for this kind of transition. You're around other adults thinking about adjacent things, you have actual time to think, and you have a soft return point at the end (back to the home base, with a bit more clarity).
Our application process does not assume any specific work situation. We have remote engineers, freelance designers, founders, doctors on sabbatical, teachers, writers. The thing they share is the willingness to make a temporary trade: slightly different work conditions in exchange for everything else the cohort offers.
If you want to talk through whether your specific work situation is workable, the easiest path is to start a conversation. Each cohort page has an interest form, and we read every one.