I talk to as many Danes as I can about this and they all express the same sentiment: ‘But why would you want to stay at home? Why wouldn’t you want your children to have other kids to play with?’ Most genuinely believe that sending under-threes to daycare is doing them a favour by allowing them to socialise early. No one can understand why a woman wouldn’t want to go back to work, in a job that she probably likes and that pays her a decent wage. The job of stay-at-home mum has, in effect, been taken over by the state. Helena C even goes so far as to say that she thinks Danish children are better at socialising than the British kids because they learn how to get on with their peers sooner.
‘But what about attachment theory?’ I counter, coming over all Oprah. ‘Don’t Danish children grow up insecure or with abandonment issues or anything?’ According to the late British psychologist John Bowlby, the difference between secure and insecure adults is determined by the kind of care you get between the ages of six months and three years. Not having your needs met in early life by your primary care-giver, usually a mother, is meant to make for needy and insecure adults who fear abandonment.
‘Interesting,’ says Helena C when I talk to her about this, ‘but the whole of Denmark has been raised like this and we seem to be doing OK, don’t we? Or do you think we’re all insecure?’ She’s got a point.
I come across an article by Charlotte Højlund, parenting expert and mother of seven children. (Yes, seven. The woman has spawned her own netball team.) I figure if anyone can give me further insight into Danish childrearing and whether it makes for happier kids, it’s her.
Charlotte is one of the most youthful-looking women I’ve ever clapped eyes on – and she has seven (seven!) children ranging from the ages of two to twenty. She also writes books on parenting and regularly appears on Danish TV as a commentator on childrearing. So I tell her to give it to me straight: does the Danish system work?
‘I think so. I’ve read about attachment theory and understand that in some cultures mothers stay at home with their children until they’re two or three years old, and maybe that would be better. But we can’t go back. Most Danish mothers work now and it’s just the way our society operates.’
Danes do indeed seem to be getting on perfectly well and, interestingly, all the studies saying ‘working mothers spell the end of civilisation as we know it’ (I paraphrase) tend to come from America, with a few from Germany or Holland. None are from Scandinavia, where women routinely go back to work when their children are less than a year old. Charlotte tells me how children’s development is taken very seriously in Denmark and how when they start at nursery, parents don’t just dump them and leave for work as they do in some countries. Instead, it’s a planned, gradual process where parents leave their offspring alone for ten minutes on the first day, then twenty minutes the next, and so on until they’ve worked up to a full day. The ‘daycare-weaning’ process can take up to three weeks. The local kommune will pay for extra members of staff if there’s a child with special needs and a child psychologist is also on hand if children need extra help.
‘There’s also an intranet and parents get regular updates via email on what their children have been doing,’ Charlotte tells me, confessing: ‘in fact, I could do with a bit less of this – with seven kids, my inbox gets pretty clogged up!’
Because they aren’t the primary carers for their children during the day, Charlotte thinks that Danish parents put in extra effort in the evenings and at weekends. ‘A lot of parents feel guilt about being away from their children because of work and so they make sure they invest a lot of time in their kids whenever they can. This may be another reason our divorce rate is so high,’ says Charlotte, a divorcee herself. ‘Parents have to take that extra time from somewhere, and they don’t want to take it away from their children or from their work – so relationships can suffer.’
I’ve just read an Open University study suggesting that couples without children were happier together than those who’d sprogged up. Oh well, too late now, I think, that horse has bolted. But interestingly, the research also found that women with children were happier than those without. So my relationship might hit the rocks but I’ll be happier than ever? Result! I decide not to show the offending article to Lego Man but am consoled by the fact that mothers in Denmark must be some of the happiest in the world.
So is Charlotte happy?
‘Of course!’ she tells me. ‘I’d say I’m a nine out of ten. Denmark is the best place in the world to have children.’
I’m pleased to hear this, of course, but I do start to suspect that everyone I speak to is a secret sleeper representative for the Danish tourist board. That, or I’m living in a Nordic version of The Truman Show.
Reassured and excited about the prospect of giving my unborn baby such a good start in life, I realise that this means I’m already thinking beyond my due date in January. By then, our year of living Danishly will have slipped into a sequel with us barely noticing. It would be easier to stay here, I rationalise, despite the language barriers, still not knowing quite how everything works and the daily opportunities for humiliation that even popping out for milk or trying to park here can afford.
Living Danishly is simpler than my previous existence back in London. It’s not as exciting, granted. But all the rules, traditions, and rituals mean that a lot of worry and stress is taken away. And it turns out that I’m OK with this. You can just be in Denmark. Relocating either heavily pregnant or with a newborn might be more than my newfound levels of Zen are ready for.
Part of me wishes that I was having a baby with old friends and family around me, in a country where I could understand the doctor’s information leaflets and knew where to buy decent clothes for my newly enlarged state. But I’m also aware that this may not have been possible in my former life. It seems likely that living Danishly is at least part of what has enabled this to happen – so I feel as though I owe the country a debt of gratitude. And if my wondrous university friends keep sending me care packages of pregnancy workout DVDs, magazines and Topshop maternity clothes, I’ll be all set.
I’m beginning to think of Denmark as home. When we tell people our news over Skype or FaceTime (tech types really need to get cracking on inventing the ‘virtual hug’), they keep asking, ‘So you’ll have the baby back in England, right?’ to which I’ve started replying, a little defensively: ‘We do have hospitals in Denmark, you know…’
The hardest thing about staying here would be making my mother a long-distance granny. She’s wanted a grandchild for as long as I can remember, and all being well, I’m on course to deliver (literally) my side of the bargain in January. Only I’m doing it 900km away. OK, so it’s not Australia, but she has a job, a life, a relationship in the UK. I can’t expect her to upend everything and fly over to see us all the time. Having a baby over here means that she’ll miss out on some of the firsts: the family outings, the bath times, the cuddles that grandparents who live around the corner take for granted. She’ll have to make do with pictures and video calls instead. I tell myself that a year of this might not be so bad. But any longer might just break her heart.
There’s still some time until we need to decide what to do, so exercising my right to be terribly British and repressed about the whole thing, I ignore the issue for now and eat my emotions instead. I distract myself with a packet of crisps – this being one of the few foodstuffs I can keep down at present. I’m just congratulating myself on my new life plan not to plan anything beyond the bountiful possibilities of baby daycare when I’m summoned to sample the Danish school system.
From the age of six, Danish children go to a state-funded folkeskole (public school) where they take classes with the same twenty-odd children for the next ten years. Being among the same classmates for the majority of their schooling is thought to help children feel secure and offer a safe, trusting environment to explore the key pillars of Danish education: equality and autonomy. As part of this, Jutland’s schoolchildren are study
ing citizenship and I’m contacted by a colleague of Lego Man’s and asked to give a talk at his daughter’s school. There is an optimistic assumption that as a ‘foreigner’ and a writer, I might be able to a) string a sentence together and b) shed some light on how Denmark appears to the rest of the world, so, flattered, I accept.
I’m interested to discover that the Danish teens I meet all appear incredibly confident and relaxed – addressing their teachers by their first names and speaking out in class to debate and discuss at every opportunity. After a thorough grilling, I leave and seek the expertise of Karen Bjerg Petersen from the department of education research at Aarhus University to find out more about The Danish Way.
‘We teach children to think and decide for themselves, not just pass exams,’ she says first off. ‘Education here is about developing the social and cognitive competencies of a child and experience-based learning. We encourage them to be critical towards the system.’ She tells me that education and democracy have been tied together in Denmark since the Second World War: ‘Children started to be encouraged to think and go against authority if they didn’t agree with what they were being told – this became a priority after the German occupation of Denmark and was something Danes were very conscious of. We wanted citizens who were democratic and could have their own ideas, so self-development is a big part of learning in Denmark.’
‘So Hitler drove the Danes to teach their schoolkids to question authority?’
‘Pretty much.’
All this emphasis on a child’s autonomy and self-expression can appear overly informal to an outsider. I tell her how strange I found it that children don’t wear uniforms and address teachers by their first names here. When I was growing up, finding out a teacher’s Christian name was the Holy Grail. It meant power. We would whisper it to each other before collapsing in fits of near-hysterical laughter, dazzled by our own daring, safe in the knowledge that Mrs Plews from Home Ec. wouldn’t scare us half so much now that we knew her first name was ‘Sue’.
‘Do Danish children have the same respect for – or fear of – their teachers?’
‘There’s still a lot of respect,’ Karen tells me, ‘but the idea is that even if you are a child, you’re still equal to your teacher as a human being, even if they’re older than you. A teacher may have a lot of knowledge, but children should also be respected as individuals.’ This is an outlandish idea for a former convent schoolgirl to get her head around. ‘So there’s no hierarchy between pupils and teachers?’
‘That’s right. Jante’s Law is very much present,’ she says. ‘Everyone is equal and no one is better than anyone else.’
The same goes for the pupils and their parents, and Karen tells me how a CEO is likely to send his kids to the same school as a shop worker or secretary in Denmark. ‘We don’t like show-offs,’ as she puts it. ‘We’re also a very wealthy society, so it’s important that when we go out internationally, our children know not to go around saying, “Do it our way! We know everything!”’
Instead, Danish children are taught the tolerance that I learned about back in May. Throughout their school career, pupils take part in ‘Friday hygge hour’, where they take it in turns to bring in cake and the class talk about any pastoral issues together.
‘My two children were told about bullying in their Friday hygge hour. The teacher explained it to them in a really calm way, making it clear that everyone had a right to feel respected and equal. Kids got told: “You might not like everyone you meet, but you need to respect their differences.”’
There’s obligatory physical education for one or two hours a week but most sport is done after school, when parents volunteer to run clubs in anything from table tennis to dance, theatre, football, and gymnastics. The Danish hobby club habit, it’s clear, starts young. ‘There are lots of possibilities for kids to do different things after school – it just depends on the parents’ interests,’ says Karen. I tell her about American Mom who’s a marketing manager by day but now coaches volleyball in the evenings and another writer who moonlights as a gymnastics assistant.
‘It’s a really good system and it helps teach children that volunteering is part of doing your bit for society,’ says Karen. It may also contribute to parents’ happiness levels. Researchers at Stony Brook and Arizona State University found that volunteering regulates stress and releases feel-good hormones like oxytocin and progesterone. And since more than 53 per cent of all Danes undertake some form of voluntary work, there are lots of happy hormones floating about.
After folkeskole, children can either leave or carry on for three more years at a gymnasium. This is the name of the follow-on school and not, as I originally hoped, a hothouse for late-flowering gymnasts (thus dashing my Beth Tweddle dreams). At gymnasium, Danish pupils study for an exam to get into higher education. They celebrate graduating from gymnasium with a hedonistic ritual of riding around in open trucks – or, round our way, tractor trailers – wearing sailor hats and having a drink at each classmate’s house until they pass out, twenty beers in, often on the beach by our house. Any Jutland parents wondering where your children are, try Sticksville.
All of these mind-expanding educational experiences are free for Danish and EU citizens – and Danes over the age of eighteen are paid to study, between 906–5,839 DKK (£96–619 or $163–1,051) a month, depending on your age, the kind of education you’re opting for, whether or not you’re living at home and how high your parents’ income is. ‘We believe that education is every human’s right and that you shouldn’t take money for it,’ says Karen.
From the ages of fourteen to eighteen, Danish teens can also opt to go to an efterskole (or ‘after school’). This is a fee-paying boarding school that will often focus on sport, drama or the arts. Around 15 per cent of Danish children go to private schools, although in Denmark, a private school isn’t terribly private. The government pays two-thirds of the fees and schools are expected to adhere to some key principles of the national curriculum. As you’d expect from a social welfare state, many Danes feel uneasy about the idea of paying to give their children an advantage. As one parent of a private school pupil I know puts it rather sheepishly: ‘It’s all a bit anti-Jante’s Law.’
Jutland’s tiny toy town of Billund has had its very own fee-paying institution since 2013, when Lego, the biggest employer in the area, funded its first school. The brainchild of Lego’s billionaire owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the school was set up to cater for the toymaker’s growing international workforce for whom Danish schooling proved a Scandi-step too far. With an emphasis on learning through play (Danish-style) combined with the International Baccalaureate, the plan was to give the children of internationals and globally focused Danes an education that was more ‘transferrable’ overseas. ‘We just thought that The Danish Way, with all its focus on freedom and creativity, might be making things tough for kids once they get out into the real world,’ admits Private School Dad. ‘The Danes can be a little … soft on kids.’
This is an interesting flip side to the overwhelmingly positive response I’ve had so far to Denmark’s education system. For all the rigor and rules and strictness of my own school days, we were encouraged to work hard. Could the free-and-easy Danish approach really get the same results? Or are Danish kids leaving school happy (which is great) but ill-prepared for the big wide world?
A documentary screened in Denmark in 2013 pitted a class of Chinese children against Danes of a similar age and concluded that the Nordic nation was an academic flop. Danes were furious. Many claimed that the Chinese students had been selected from one of the best schools in the country and had been coached ahead of filming. These children, critics argued, couldn’t possibly be compared to an average class in Denmark where the goal is to create well-rounded free thinkers. But could there still be a worry that young, carefree Danes aren’t ready for the cut-throat international labour market? Despite the new emphasis on ‘understanding citizenship’, do they really have the skills and discipli
ne to survive out there? I read about students at a school in Copenhagen who are so relaxed and laid-back that social workers have started making house calls to wake them up in the morning and coax them to their folkeskole. This, I decide, is insane.
As someone who’s been raising children and observing the sea changes in parenting and education for the past twenty years, I go back to Charlotte, mum of seven (seven!), for her take on the current state of affairs.
‘In Denmark,’ she says, ‘we have an education system where teachers are just as concerned about pupils’ social development and happiness as the school’s advancement up a league table – and I think that’s something we can be proud of.’ But, she agrees, some aspects of the school system may have gone astray.
‘In the past, parents had the responsibility for a child’s upbringing and school was responsible for their learning,’ says Charlotte, ‘but now the state seems to like to be in charge of both.’ She cites a recent memo from her school that advised parents of pupils taking exams to ‘keep them regularly refreshed with trays of tea and biscuits’. ‘I mean, I’m a parent, I have seven children [seven!]. I’m not running around waiting on them!’ I agree wholeheartedly – if anything, they should be bringing her biscuits, I tell her. But because both parents work all day and then shower their offspring with love and affection during their down-time, Danish children can sometimes end up a little spoilt, Charlotte says.
‘We have a lot of “curling parents” in Denmark, who do everything for their kids and won’t say no to them. The expression is named after the sport – only it’s the parents with the brooms who keep brushing in front of their kids, removing any obstacles to make their lives easier.’
The Year of Living Danishly Page 19