The Year of Living Danishly (19 page)

‘Of course there are quite a lot of fights, because teachers don't tend to intervene much,' American Mom interrupts my reverie, bursting my bliss bubble.

‘Oh!'

‘Yeah, there are bruises and sometimes scratches,' she goes on, ‘but the kids are mostly OK in the end. And they always want to go back the next day.'

I hold a hand over my stomach protectively.

‘Doesn't it scare you? Seeing your children get into fights?' I ask, mentally inspecting hers for bumps and feeling a ripple of relief when I note that their youthfully perfect skin is blemish-free – albeit covered in sand.

‘It did a little, at the start – but kids have a lot of freedom in Denmark. And I think that's worth a lot in the long run.'

Numerous studies have shown that children growing up in the UK and US today are missing out on the full-throttled fun of being a kid because they're so micro-managed and swaddled in cotton wool; protected from dirt and dust and grazed knees, and stuck inside on iPads instead. But for kids living Danishly, there's more of a
Famous Five
-meets-
Swallows and Amazons
approach to child rearing. And the kids I've seen so far appear to be thriving on it.

Of course, the system has its critics.

‘It's not freedom, it's laziness,' a Danish mother-of-three tells me. ‘The staff at my son's nursery just sit there and drink coffee while the kids run wild.' Another expat says that stay-at-home mums are looked down on in Denmark: ‘It's assumed that both parents go back to work here, and the fact that I haven't seems to reduce my status.'

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 studying 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.