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This article from Britain's Guardian, offers a good comparison of thoughts about children and how to raise them.
The comparison is about giving them early freedom to think and learn to be responsible on one side, and helicoptering them on the other side,
I had thoughts on both sides, but they are tempered by my own childhood experience, where my mother walked me to school for the first week of school until I learned my way.. I was taught about street and traffic dangers, even earlier.
After that first week, and for the rest of my days and years, I went alone or with friends. Depending on the school it was by walking or by public bus to one. school.
From The Guardian
It’s 1.30pm. Nila and Arion arrive home after finishing school for the day. They let themselves in, make some food, then sit down to do homework, or practise piano, or do the housework they’ve been asked to do. Their parents won’t be home for a few hours yet. The children sometimes go out with friends to play in the street or wander the fields. The only real rule is no screen time unless everything else has been taken care of.
So far, so normal, perhaps, except the sister and brother are just 10 and eight, and they’ve been living this kind of unsupervised mini-adult life for years.
They live in Stavanger, on the south-west coast of Norway. Like all of their friends, they’ve been walking to and from school alone since they first attended at the age of six. They were given their own set of house keys soon after. This is the parenting way in Norway – it’s decidedly free-range, with an emphasis on independence, self-determination and responsibility, with a dash of outdoor fun thrown in for good measure.
I’ve known Nila and Arion since they were born (their parents are close friends), and I have consistently marvelled at the space and freedom they are given. On my visits to their home, I can never help but compare their upbringing with the way I and millions of other Britons were raised. While not exactly repressive or restrictive, 80s British parenting didn’t value autonomy in the same way. I certainly didn’t get my own chef’s knife for my eighth birthday, as Nila did a couple of years ago. She puts it to good use; she’s solely responsible for cooking dinner for the family one night a week.
“I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t parent like this,” says Nila and Arion’s dad, Giancarlo Napoli. He recalls one child in Nila’s class whose parents moved to another town a few years back. Rather than switch schools, this child now walks 20 minutes from his home to the train station, takes a 20-minute train journey, then has another 20-minute walk at the other end from the station to school. “This kid does that twice a day, and no one bats an eyelid,” he says. (On a related note, Norwegian children as young as seven have been known to make solo journeys from one end of Norway to the other to visit their divorced parents.)
Giancarlo is British, and moved to Stavanger in 2006 after meeting his Norwegian wife, Lena, while travelling. He teaches at a nearby college and is now a fully integrated member of Norwegian society – and a paid-up member of the free-range parenting club. But he admits it did take him some time to adjust.
Of course, free-range parenting does rather fit in with perceptions outsiders often have about Scandinavian people. Look at them all, with their hygge, and their sky-high living standards, low crime rates, enviable maternity and paternity rights and exceptional aesthetics. Norway is indeed seventh on the World Happiness Report. It also has the world’s 10th highest GDP, along with the world’s largest wealth fund and one of the world’s lowest crime rates. But this is a philosophy that runs deeper than Norway’s pockets, and it’s been around far longer than the country’s well-funded public services have.
There’s evidence that Viking children as far back as the ninth century were raised in a relatively similar way: treated as adults and expected to chip in with whatever work needed to be done. It’s a way of life, deeply ingrained to the point that most Norwegians I’ve spoken to can’t understand either the fascination with their method, or why anyone would do it differently.
This more nuanced modern take – more conversations about feelings, less pillaging – rose to prominence in the aftermath of the second world war, says Willy-Tore Mørch, emeritus professor in children’s mental health at the University of Tromsø. Much of the country’s infrastructure had been devastated by the years of Nazi occupation. Rising to the challenge, the newly formed Labour government believed that all Norwegians should contribute to the rebuilding – children included.
“The children had to be strong and hardened, and trained to be independent and loyal,” says Mørch. “Perhaps most parents today are not aware of this history, but building trust between parents and children remains a basic relational quality in modern Norwegian child-raising.”
There is also another, more practical reason underpinning some of this parenting style. “Most women here work,” says Mette Tveit, a curator and historian at Stavanger Museum. Norway has among the most gender-equal workforces, with about 73% of all men of working age in employment, and about 67% of women. Childcare is also widely available and highly affordable, meaning that going out to work is financially worthwhile. For example, kindergarten fees for 10 hours a day, five days a week, are capped at NOK 2,000 (£150) a month. In the UK, the average cost for under-twos in full-time childcare is £300 a week.
Tveit adds that Norwegian children are, in her experience, so independent that they organise their own playdates with peers. “I spend time in the US and I see how the parents arrange those things, but in Norway, even young children will organise their social events and manage their spare time. They just get on with things. It’s normal for Norwegian children to tell their parents what they’re doing; it’s not that normal to ask permission. They are just trusted to make good decisions.”
Trust is something that comes up when I talk to Giancarlo and Lena about their parenting, and how mutual respect is crucial. In the school holidays, for example, they’re happy for Nila and Arion to be out all day as long as they know roughly what time they’ll return – and the children comply. Lena says this is how her mother and grandmother were raised, and fondly remembers going to school herself as a six-year-old with a front door key around her neck on a piece of string. She also thinks this way of parenting should be preserved, despite the temptation to introduce technology into the equation.
“You can get GPS watches for kids, where you can track them and so on,” she says. “[But] it’s really important to me that it’s not a fake sense of freedom that we give the children. There was one time we thought Nila had gone missing, and even though I know if she’d had one of those watches we could’ve just checked to see where she was and not been worried, that’s not the point.”
It turns out Nila had been playing out with a friend when the friend’s grandparent invited them indoors for a drink and an iced bun and she had simply lost track of time. “It was important for her to see we were worried, and she’s never done it again,” says Lena.
Failure, it seems, is a big part of Norwegian parenting – enjoy the freedom to make mistakes, but learn from them. There’s a tacit understanding that yes, you can climb that tree, but you might fall and hurt yourself. Or maybe falling will make you a better climber in future?
The comparison is about giving them early freedom to think and learn to be responsible on one side, and helicoptering them on the other side,
I had thoughts on both sides, but they are tempered by my own childhood experience, where my mother walked me to school for the first week of school until I learned my way.. I was taught about street and traffic dangers, even earlier.
After that first week, and for the rest of my days and years, I went alone or with friends. Depending on the school it was by walking or by public bus to one. school.
From The Guardian
It’s 1.30pm. Nila and Arion arrive home after finishing school for the day. They let themselves in, make some food, then sit down to do homework, or practise piano, or do the housework they’ve been asked to do. Their parents won’t be home for a few hours yet. The children sometimes go out with friends to play in the street or wander the fields. The only real rule is no screen time unless everything else has been taken care of.
So far, so normal, perhaps, except the sister and brother are just 10 and eight, and they’ve been living this kind of unsupervised mini-adult life for years.
They live in Stavanger, on the south-west coast of Norway. Like all of their friends, they’ve been walking to and from school alone since they first attended at the age of six. They were given their own set of house keys soon after. This is the parenting way in Norway – it’s decidedly free-range, with an emphasis on independence, self-determination and responsibility, with a dash of outdoor fun thrown in for good measure.
I’ve known Nila and Arion since they were born (their parents are close friends), and I have consistently marvelled at the space and freedom they are given. On my visits to their home, I can never help but compare their upbringing with the way I and millions of other Britons were raised. While not exactly repressive or restrictive, 80s British parenting didn’t value autonomy in the same way. I certainly didn’t get my own chef’s knife for my eighth birthday, as Nila did a couple of years ago. She puts it to good use; she’s solely responsible for cooking dinner for the family one night a week.
“I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t parent like this,” says Nila and Arion’s dad, Giancarlo Napoli. He recalls one child in Nila’s class whose parents moved to another town a few years back. Rather than switch schools, this child now walks 20 minutes from his home to the train station, takes a 20-minute train journey, then has another 20-minute walk at the other end from the station to school. “This kid does that twice a day, and no one bats an eyelid,” he says. (On a related note, Norwegian children as young as seven have been known to make solo journeys from one end of Norway to the other to visit their divorced parents.)
Giancarlo is British, and moved to Stavanger in 2006 after meeting his Norwegian wife, Lena, while travelling. He teaches at a nearby college and is now a fully integrated member of Norwegian society – and a paid-up member of the free-range parenting club. But he admits it did take him some time to adjust.
Of course, free-range parenting does rather fit in with perceptions outsiders often have about Scandinavian people. Look at them all, with their hygge, and their sky-high living standards, low crime rates, enviable maternity and paternity rights and exceptional aesthetics. Norway is indeed seventh on the World Happiness Report. It also has the world’s 10th highest GDP, along with the world’s largest wealth fund and one of the world’s lowest crime rates. But this is a philosophy that runs deeper than Norway’s pockets, and it’s been around far longer than the country’s well-funded public services have.
There’s evidence that Viking children as far back as the ninth century were raised in a relatively similar way: treated as adults and expected to chip in with whatever work needed to be done. It’s a way of life, deeply ingrained to the point that most Norwegians I’ve spoken to can’t understand either the fascination with their method, or why anyone would do it differently.
This more nuanced modern take – more conversations about feelings, less pillaging – rose to prominence in the aftermath of the second world war, says Willy-Tore Mørch, emeritus professor in children’s mental health at the University of Tromsø. Much of the country’s infrastructure had been devastated by the years of Nazi occupation. Rising to the challenge, the newly formed Labour government believed that all Norwegians should contribute to the rebuilding – children included.
“The children had to be strong and hardened, and trained to be independent and loyal,” says Mørch. “Perhaps most parents today are not aware of this history, but building trust between parents and children remains a basic relational quality in modern Norwegian child-raising.”
There is also another, more practical reason underpinning some of this parenting style. “Most women here work,” says Mette Tveit, a curator and historian at Stavanger Museum. Norway has among the most gender-equal workforces, with about 73% of all men of working age in employment, and about 67% of women. Childcare is also widely available and highly affordable, meaning that going out to work is financially worthwhile. For example, kindergarten fees for 10 hours a day, five days a week, are capped at NOK 2,000 (£150) a month. In the UK, the average cost for under-twos in full-time childcare is £300 a week.
Tveit adds that Norwegian children are, in her experience, so independent that they organise their own playdates with peers. “I spend time in the US and I see how the parents arrange those things, but in Norway, even young children will organise their social events and manage their spare time. They just get on with things. It’s normal for Norwegian children to tell their parents what they’re doing; it’s not that normal to ask permission. They are just trusted to make good decisions.”
Trust is something that comes up when I talk to Giancarlo and Lena about their parenting, and how mutual respect is crucial. In the school holidays, for example, they’re happy for Nila and Arion to be out all day as long as they know roughly what time they’ll return – and the children comply. Lena says this is how her mother and grandmother were raised, and fondly remembers going to school herself as a six-year-old with a front door key around her neck on a piece of string. She also thinks this way of parenting should be preserved, despite the temptation to introduce technology into the equation.
“You can get GPS watches for kids, where you can track them and so on,” she says. “[But] it’s really important to me that it’s not a fake sense of freedom that we give the children. There was one time we thought Nila had gone missing, and even though I know if she’d had one of those watches we could’ve just checked to see where she was and not been worried, that’s not the point.”
It turns out Nila had been playing out with a friend when the friend’s grandparent invited them indoors for a drink and an iced bun and she had simply lost track of time. “It was important for her to see we were worried, and she’s never done it again,” says Lena.
Failure, it seems, is a big part of Norwegian parenting – enjoy the freedom to make mistakes, but learn from them. There’s a tacit understanding that yes, you can climb that tree, but you might fall and hurt yourself. Or maybe falling will make you a better climber in future?
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