There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  After Maya’s first day at her new school, she confidently announces, “Tomorrow I want to go by myself,” politely declining my mom’s offer to go with her. When she comes back in the afternoon she is again bubbling with stories about class, the food she has eaten, and the new friends that she has made. During the week that follows I get bombarded with reports: “Guess what we did for PE class today! We went sledding and I went with Oliver and Hannes and Nellie down the hill and we went soooo fast, over a bump, and then we ended up in a big pile! For lunch we got fish; I didn’t like that much but the potatoes were pretty good. Then we had social science and we talked about different professions. Hey, by the way, did you sing this song when you were little?” she rattles off, and starts singing a song that, sure enough, I sang in music class when I was in second grade. For the first time in her soon-to-be-eight-year-old life I could tell that she was genuinely excited about school. She was no longer just “Ready to Learn” as that behavior chart with the wooden clothespins on the wall in her classroom back home had often noted. She was motivated to learn.

  After two weeks at her new school, Maya receives an invitation to a birthday party from one of her classmates. “Sledding Party,” the invite says. “Bring a helmet and something to ride on!” I’m intrigued. I had always tried to incorporate outdoor treasure hunts for Maya’s birthday in February and thankfully her friends’ parents were good sports who never complained about getting their kids back muddy. But the concept of holding an entire party outside in January was new to me.

  On the day of the party we load up the car with some borrowed snow racers and toboggans, including some sort of plastic stand-up board contraption that looks like it may have caused a few hairline fractures back in the ’80s. Maya’s classmate Hannes lives outside of town on a small farm with some egg-laying hens, a few sheep, and arguably one of the best sledding hills in the county. His mother, Anette, is an energetic and straightforward woman who smiles almost as much as she talks. When we arrive she’s busy cooking hot dogs and heating saft, a sweet drink popular with kids, over an open fire. She’s surrounded by sixteen snowsuit-clad children, sitting on blankets and cushions laid out on seats dug out of some big piles of snow, and a couple of old benches. The kids are champing at the bit to get down to business on the long, steep, and slightly curved hill by the house, and don’t even bother taking their helmets off as they inhale carrots and hot dogs by the dozens.

  “We did a sledding party last year, too, and the kids wanted to do it again,” Anette says when I ask her why they decided to do an outdoor birthday party. “They really like it.” She tosses a few hot dogs on the grill and implores one of the boys to please finish chewing his carrots before getting on his sled. “We always have our birthday parties outside,” she continues. “One year we had a disco in a teepee, disco ball and all. I like having the parties outside. Honestly, we do it partly because we’re lazy. Can you imagine having sixteen kids in the house? No, thank you! That’s going to turn into chaos really fast. It’s a lot easier to clean up after an outdoor party.”

  As I suspected, Anette and her husband and three kids spend a great deal of time outside in general, not only during birthday parties. On the weekends, the family often cooks lunch over the fire pit rather than going inside. Getting outside on a daily basis has been a priority since the kids were little. “You have to get them out now, not when they’re thirteen, regardless of how torturous it can be sometimes. I don’t know how many times we’ve bundled them up to go ice-skating, and then they get tired of it after fifteen minutes. But now we’re reaping the benefits from taking the kids outside a lot since they were little. Now we can go down to the lake and ice-skate together as a family.”

  On the sledding hill, the kids are packing down the snow with their snow racers, and the track seems to get a little faster with each run. One after one the kids come flying down the hill, one blond girl screaming with terror as she quickly approaches a tall barrier of snow at the bottom of the slope. “Veer to the right!” Anette yells, but the girl’s hands appear frozen to the steering wheel, and she crashes straight into the embankment. “I couldn’t steer!” she cries, tears flowing down her bright pink cheeks. Anette wraps her arms around her and comforts her. “You’re okay. Nothing happened. You just need to steer away from the snowbank next time.”

  “Don’t you worry that somebody will get hurt?” I ask Anette when things are back under control. It’s the little liability voices in my head that are talking.

  “In the beginning I did, but no, not anymore,” she says. “It’s dangerous to be inside, too, you know. What if a ceiling lamp falls down on your head?”

  She’s joking, of course, but there is a serious undertone. As a nurse, she’s all too familiar with the health consequences of sitting on the couch (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, rickets, and myopia, just to name a few), and she was damned if she was going to let her family fall into that trap.

  “It’s so important to our health that we stay active. I think we’re going to face a public health crisis if we don’t use our bones when we’re young,” she says. “We like our fika and we like baking together. But if we have something sweet we also go outside and move around. If the kids don’t want to do that I tell them they can eat some carrots instead.”

  After a while, it’s time to break for hot chocolate and homemade brownies that are individually decorated with the Swedish flag—a yellow cross against a blue backdrop. It’s a simple dessert but no less appreciated by the kids, who wolf down the chocolaty treats and move on to do a treasure hunt in the snow, led by Anette’s husband. Then more sledding until the parents start showing up to pick up their charges. A few parents can’t resist the call of the hill. “Sledding is underrated,” one mom hollers as she comes to a stop at the bottom. Maya and Nora are the last stragglers on the sledding hill, high on hot chocolate and their own speed.

  “I’m sorry, I feel like we’ve overstayed our welcome,” I tell Anette as night starts to fall around us, an hour after the official end of the party. “I’ll call the last run now.”

  “Oh, no, not at all. Don’t you just love it when the kids want to stay outside and play in the fresh air?”

  We bond over that statement and decide to get the kids together again sometime.

  On our way back to the Shack we see about a dozen teenagers out on the lake, ice-skating and singing at the top of their lungs. The light from their headlamps is bouncing back and forth on the ice, making the ice skaters look like the cast in an impromptu and unchoreographed stage show.

  At this point, I was no longer worried about Maya not finding any friends at school or getting homesick, and I had all but forgotten about the weekly spelling lists and math reviews that I was supposed to have her work on. I had a much bigger issue on my mind: What if she wouldn’t want to go back to the US when our time in Sweden was up?

  Scandinavian Parenting Tip #2

  If it is safe and practical where you live, let your baby nap outside when the weather permits, and seek out opportunities to spend as much time outside as possible. As your child gets older, choose outdoor activities that the whole family enjoys and be sure to adjust your expectations to your child’s pace and day-to-day form. Plan well for longer outings, and remember that you can never bring too many emergency snacks!

  Suggested reading: Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children, by Angela Hanscom. New Harbinger, 2016.

  3

  * * *

  JUST LET THEM PLAY

  Most of what children need to learn during their early

  childhood years cannot be taught; it’s discovered through play.

  —RUTH WILSON

  One night, I get a phone call from my friend Sue back in the States. She tells me that she started having trouble getting her oldest son out of the car in the drop-off line at preschool. “I asked him why he doesn’t want to go to school and he said he’s bored. He’s four! How does h
e even know what ‘bored’ means?” she laments. “I think it’s some combination of him not connecting with any of the kids and having to sit still at a desk for the first time in his life and do papers when he’s a kid who loves to move around.”

  She had sent her son to preschool with the same idea a lot of parents have when they send their kids to preschool: that he would play and socialize with other kids. Now she was feeling defeated and was in disbelief about the whole thing. “I don’t even want to send him to preschool again next year, and I don’t want to send his little brother at all, but when I tell people that, they tell me they’re going to fall behind,” she says.

  Sue herself didn’t go to preschool at all, and kindergarten only lasted for a mostly play-filled half day back then. She still managed to make it through school with top grades, put herself through college and law school, and today runs a successful law firm. Her gut instinct told her that her sons, too, would be fine, but she wasn’t getting a whole lot of support. “There’s a lot of pressure. What if I ruin their chances of getting into college and they end up in the gutter living off the government because I didn’t make the right decision about preschool?” She’s only half-joking—and thanking her lucky stars that her youngest son has a September birthday, so he’ll miss all the cutoffs. If she and her husband do end up sending him to preschool, he’ll be almost five by the time he starts.

  The preschool that her older son goes to is a parent cooperative that has a play-based approach to learning, with plenty of field trips, sensory bins, and hands-on experiments mixed in with traditional academics. At least it tries to. Lately, the teachers had come under pressure from the public school to adapt to the ever-increasing requirements of kindergarten. Parents, too, feared that socializing, playing, singing, and learning how to be a good friend didn’t do enough to prepare their prodigies for what was to come. Some even felt like they had no choice but to move their children to other preschools that focused more on academics.

  “It was nothing against the teachers, I just heard so much about all the testing that is done now, and I felt like he wasn’t making much progress,” said one mom who was disappointed that her three-year-old son wasn’t learning how to write fast enough. “Finally we decided to move him, and this school is completely different. Now he brings home little worksheets for tracing letters every week.”

  Meanwhile, the teachers seemed exasperated from the pressure. “I even felt guilty for letting the three-year-olds play for an hour yesterday,” one of them divulged. “I had to tell them to get back to their book work.”

  Bowing to the pressure from the school district and from disgruntled parents, the teachers at the parent cooperative recently started handing out weekly homework assignments to the four-year-olds. This was by no means unique for this preschool, just a symptom of a national trend of putting more and more pressure on three- and four-year-olds to learn academic facts. If kindergarten was the new first grade, as some educators claimed, it certainly seemed like preschool had become the new kindergarten.

  Talking to Sue made me think of the time when Maya had gone to preschool, four years ago. In the fall of her last year, with just under two semesters to go, some of the other parents had gotten stressed-out and antsy about their children’s progress. They complained that the children spent too much time playing and doing crafts and experiments. I was puzzled. Most of the kids were only four years old; what did they expect them to be doing? Like Sue, I had sent Maya to preschool thinking that it would be good for her to socialize and play with children other than the ones she saw at the babysitter’s house. She was still learning to tie her shoes and stand in line for the bathroom and make great mud pies. Her vocabulary had grown immensely since she started preschool, and academically I couldn’t think of much to worry about at this age. Then again, I was still blissfully ignorant of the rigors of American kindergarten.

  “When we went to preschool, it used to be all about playing and sitting in a circle and singing songs,” one mom, an elementary school teacher, told me. “Parents still think they’re sending their kids to kindergarten so they can learn how to share and take turns, but that’s just not how it is anymore.”

  “These hands-on activities are great fun and all that, but I just don’t see how that’s going to get them ready for kindergarten,” another mother said, voicing her concern about the direction of the preschool. And then, ominously, “I guess we’ll find out at kindergarten screening.”

  These parents had gotten the message from the US Department of Education, and it was crystal clear. Kids these days need to spend less time molding Play-Doh and more time preparing for their corporate careers.

  Until that time, I hadn’t even known what kindergarten screening was. I had simply trusted that Maya would learn what she needed to learn in her own time, and it hadn’t struck me that she might flunk some cryptic entry test to elementary school—in fact, I didn’t even know those existed. Now it sounded like this was a real threat, something that I hadn’t worried nearly enough about.

  When I asked a kindergarten teacher about the screening process, she assured me that it was not a high-stakes test that would make or break my daughter’s future, but rather an assessment tool that was used to determine whether a child was developmentally ready for kindergarten, and whether he or she might need extra assistance in the classroom. The teacher also told me she thought preschool should be about having fun and doing “all the things that we don’t have time for in kindergarten, like playing, painting, singing, reading stories, and playing games.”

  That took care of my concern about kindergarten screening, but the more I learned about actual kindergarten, the more I fretted about enrolling Maya.

  Playing Is Learning

  * * *

  Before we left the US, Nora had gone to the same preschool as Maya, and now that she was about to enroll in a preschool in Sweden, we were in for a radical change. Preschools in Scandinavia are different from those in the US since they generally offer full-time or part-time care all year-round for children who are as young as one year old. The model is sometimes called “educare,” because the purpose of the preschools here is to simultaneously educate and care for children whose parents work outside the home. Since that is most parents, a vast majority of Scandinavian children (as many as 84 percent in Sweden) between the ages of one and five are enrolled in preschool.

  Another big difference is that preschool in the Scandinavian countries is more or less universal, as the fees are heavily subsidized by the government. To a lot of Americans, having the government in charge of your child’s day care probably sounds as wise as giving the fox a VIP pass to the chicken coop. But Scandinavian parents don’t see it this way. When the parents of 108,000 preschool-age children in Sweden were asked what they thought about their child’s day care, 95 percent of them responded that they were happy with it. This is pretty remarkable considering that it can sometimes be hard to get that many people to agree that snow is white, and that any opinions relating to raising children have a tendency to trigger tribal warfare.

  Although preschools in Sweden are funded by the central government, they can be owned and operated directly by local municipalities, private businesses, or parent cooperatives. Regardless, they are required to have a certified preschool teacher in charge, and they all follow the same national curriculum. Part of the reason why parents in Sweden are so contented with the preschool system is probably that this national curriculum very much reflects Swedes’ general idea of what early childhood should be about. And tracing letters is not it.

  The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document’s word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word play thirteen times, language twelve times, nature six times, and math five t
imes. But there is not a single mention of literacy or writing. Instead, two of the most frequently used words are learning (with forty-eight appearances) and development (forty-seven).

  The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn’t start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because “their monolithic culture values reading.” They have something else in common: their commitment to play in the early years.