The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

by Anu Partanen

Nordic crime novels and design trends might be popular in America, but many politicians in the United States pointed to the way the Nordic states coddled their citizens with indulgences that hadn’t been earned, and in the process crushed anyone with even a shred of entrepreneurial spirit. The result was nations of helpless, naive, childlike people who lived in a state of unhealthy dependency on their governments. Of course such a society would produce a sissy like me.

So maybe I had it backward. Maybe I wasn’t racked by anxiety because I came from a foreign country. Maybe I was racked by anxiety because I was becoming an American.

The longer I lived in America, therefore, and the more places I visited and the more people I met—and the more American I myself became—the more puzzled I grew. For it was exactly those key benefits of modernity—freedom, personal independence, and opportunity—that seemed, from my outsider’s perspective, in a thousand small ways to be surprisingly missing from American life today. Amid the anxiety and stress of people’s daily lives, those grand ideals were looking more theoretical than actual.

Rather, in order to compete and to survive, the Americans I encountered and read about were being forced to depend more and more on one another, in a throwback to the traditional relationships of old. And in the process, individuals were becoming beholden to their spouses, parents, children, colleagues, and bosses in ways that constrained their own liberty. The demands and tensions caused by this state of affairs seemed to be making everyone’s stress and anxiety even worse—even in the areas of life that they cherished the most, such as right at home, in the family.

When I visited someone’s home in the United States, I couldn’t shake a strange sensation that I had never quite had back in Finland: that somehow the children were taking over their parents’ lives. As usual I blamed myself for being a stodgy, closed-minded Nordic, inadequate to the cutting-edge innovations of American life.

I was surprised by how frequently I heard even grown adults in the United States say that their parents were their best friends. This level of dependency among older children on their parents was almost unheard of back in Nordic countries.

It was a recipe not for raising independent children well equipped to handle the challenges of modern life for themselves, but rather for raising children handicapped by an almost premodern form of dependency. Yet the root of the trouble did not seem to be emotional or psychological at all, but rather structural—the result of such problems as failing public schools and soaring college costs.

Yet the American reality was that getting married was still understood as an act of financial commingling. For proof of this one needed to look no further than the first few lines of a typical U.S. tax return. The IRS rewards married couples for pooling their incomes and filing their taxes as a joint unit. This is a startling practice to anyone from Finland, where each individual is always taxed independently—marital status has nothing to do with paying your taxes.

As for my Finnish friends and I, we never sat around discussing what sort of salaries we hoped for in a spouse. Finances seldom came up as a factor in the marriage equation. People generally assumed that both partners would have jobs, but that was about it.

If both parents went back to work, could they afford a nanny or private day care, either one of which was a huge expense? When the child grew even older, American parents would then have to tally up the enormous costs of trying to afford a house near a good public school, or paying tuition for a private school, assuming their child could even get in—not to mention the costs of saving for college.

When money and access to money predetermined every major decision affecting a family and a child’s future, it was no wonder that an American woman might pay attention to a potential husband’s paycheck and benefits package, no matter how modern-minded she was.

Less obvious than the matter of health care, but also insidious, was the hesitancy of practically every American I met to take their full allotment of vacation time, as allowed by their employer, no matter how paltry. Never mind actually leaving work every day at five.

Moreover, it wasn’t even in the realm of possibility that all my health care could be compromised by anything to do with my job.

They enjoyed the full parental leaves they were entitled to in order to raise a healthy baby, and they freely asked their employers for part-time hours for periods of time when their children were young. People throughout the Nordic countries are far less concerned that such requests will reflect badly with their employers or have negative repercussions for their careers. The reason is quite simple: In the Nordic countries the basics of health care and other social benefits and essential services simply do not depend on one’s employment to the degree they do in the United States.

But no one seemed to be talking about the other side of the coin: the unhealthy dependence on employers that this creates among employees receiving, or hoping to receive, these benefits. It was an old-fashioned and oppressive sort of dependence, it seemed to me, completely at odds with the modern era of individual liberty and opportunity. I could see the consequences in the lives of everyone I knew.

One might even say that Nordic societies had succeeded in pushing past outdated forms of social dependency, and that they had taken modernity to its logical conclusion. The Nordic nations had found an approach to government that deployed policies in a smarter way to create in individual citizens not a culture of dependency, but rather, a new culture of personal self-sufficiency that matched modern life.

Liberated from many of the more onerous financial and logistical obligations of the old days, we can base our relationships with family, friends, and loved ones more on pure human connection. We are also freer to express our true feelings in our relationships with others.

Over the past seventy years what the experience of the Nordic nations actually suggests is that even the United States, with its already very impressive commitments to freedom, might actually be able to learn a few things from us about freedom and free-market capitalism.

However, what really motivates Swedes and other Nordic citizens to support their system isn’t altruism—no one is that selfless—but self-interest.

In an age when people are experiencing more freedom than ever, Finland and its Nordic neighbors have found a way to expand personal liberty while also ensuring that the vast majority of individuals—not just the elite—have new ways to be stable and be able to prosper.

Advocates for family leave in the United States celebrate California’s example as progressive, and it is certainly a start. But by the standards of any Nordic country, a paltry six weeks at half pay is still way behind the times.

Overall the reality in the United States is grim: In 2015 only one in ten Americans working for private companies had access to paid family leave—although 87 percent did get at least some unpaid leave. Fully a third of private-sector workers had no access to any paid sick days. A quarter had no paid vacation. Even for those who did have paid vacation, the average length of the allotted vacation for a full-time worker in private industry was, after one year of employment, just ten days.

Throughout the entire Nordic region, the universal minimum amount of parental leave that new parents receive, regardless of where they work, is nine months. While on leave the parent who stays home also receives at least 70 percent of his or her pay for the entire duration of the leave.

In Finland the first four months of parental leave go specifically to the mother, and the leave begins at least five weeks before her due date.

In Sweden families receive 480 days of paid parental leave—approximately sixteen months—to use at any time they like before a child turns four, and part of these days can be saved and used anytime before the child turns twelve.

It is worth emphasizing that no employer of any size in Nordic countries can deny parents access to any of these policies. They are enshrined at the national level. Inspired by the Nordic theory of love, this is the commitment that Nordic societies have made to families—and, more specifically, to children.

On the whole Finns tend to see the baby box as a delightful rite of passage, and a symbolic welcome from society at large. It says: We honor your choice to have children, and we support you in the adventure; you’re not alone.

Instead boomerang kids and their parents must revert to a complex and prolonged negotiation of financial and psychological dependency, which easily becomes laced with embarrassment, anxiety, resentment, and guilt.

To a Nordic ear, the idea of promoting marriage, one of the most precious of human experiences, as a policy solution to poverty sounds like something from the distant past. Marriage today shouldn’t be used to force people into a pact of financial dependency as it was in the old days, back when every decent person—especially every decent woman—sacrificed his or her true desires and set aside any qualms about the union for the sake of familial legacy and property. This is exactly the sort of old-fashioned arrangement that modernity is supposed to have freed us from.

Extended time on minimum benefits is not what most people want from life. Parental leaves are meant to be breaks in a steady career, not a way of life, and Nordic policies ensure that for the vast majority of people, that is exactly what they are.

The American fear that government assistance automatically weakens families, encourages single parenthood, and creates welfare queens is not borne out by the experience of the Nordic countries.

From the perspective of implementing the Nordic theory of love, focusing on the family is a mistake. A family will not function well as a team unless it is first composed of strong, self-sufficient individuals. So instead Nordic societies work to ensure independence for the individual members involved.

American mothers spend about twice as much time caring for their children as do fathers, and when it comes to housework in general, American women spend about triple the amount of time on it that men do. American women spend far more time than men doing such unpaid work—substantially more than Nordic women do in relation to Nordic men.

The more educated the mother, it turns out, the longer she breast-feeds.

Gender equality in Nordic societies is thus not an abstract goal, pursued for its own sake. Instead it serves the larger goals of the Nordic theory of love: that all individuals be self-sufficient, so that they can give more purely and generously of their affection and care.

Iceland has become famous for its so-called 3+3+3 model, in which a total of nine months of parental leave are divided into three equal blocks of three months each. One of these blocks can be used by either parent, but of the two remaining blocks, one belongs to the mother and one to the father. If the father doesn’t take his personal allotment, the mother is not eligible to take it instead. In Norway the father similarly has a special share of ten weeks that are daddy-only, and in Sweden daddies get an exclusive three months. In Finland the father’s personal share is nine weeks, of which three can be taken at the same time as the mother.

In the United States the average annual cost of full-time child care for an infant in a day-care center ranged from $4,800 per year in Mississippi to $22,600 in the District of Columbia in 2014, with the cost exceeding $10,000 per year in twenty states, according to the nonprofit group Child Care Aware.

All this creativity in figuring out child care uses up vast amounts of everyone’s energy and brainpower, and steals away many hours and days that could be better spent. It always seems to me a surprising waste of time and potential. For citizens of Nordic societies, for the most part, these problems simply don’t exist. A simple and universal commitment at the national level to paid parental leaves of a realistic length alleviates much of the financial stress and workplace demands on families with babies.

But if you want to have a family in a Nordic country, you just go ahead and do so. And once you do, the time and energy that you spend on your kids can be focused mostly on loving them, being with them, and raising them, not working so hard to afford them that you never get to see them.

How does this compare with the United States? Throughout the same period the performance of American students in the PISA survey has been middling at best. In 2012 the United States came in twenty-first in combined performance in reading, mathematics, and science among the thirty-four OECD countries, and in mathematics it performed below average at twenty-seventh.

“And,” he mentioned at one point, “there are no private schools in Finland.”

It’s an unfortunate fact that the United States remains astonishingly backward compared to almost all other advanced Western countries when it comes to education, because in America, what predicts how well a child will do in school is not a child’s aptitude or hard work, but the status of the child’s parents—which is to say, their own levels of education and wealth.

So why are Nordic parents so seemingly delinquent when it comes to giving their toddlers a head start? The answer is disarmingly simple: Childhood should be childhood. Finnish day-care centers have no specific goals when it comes to teaching the alphabet, or numbers, or vocabulary. Instead they follow each individual child’s interests and create a foundation for later independent learning by supporting children’s social skills and curiosity.

The Finnish education guru Pasi Sahlberg put it this way during his talk at Teachers College: “In the Finnish language we don’t have the word accountability. It doesn’t exist,” he said. “In Finland we think that accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

Securing a job with benefits, or at least this one benefit, could literally mean the difference between normal life and bankruptcy, or even life and death. It also struck me as peculiarly un-American that private businesses would be saddled with such a profound social duty. It sounded so, well, socialist. Wasn’t the purpose of a business to make profits, not to arrange the medical treatment of its employees?

From the perspective of any society that claims to value and support the autonomy of the individual, the fact that at least half of all Americans depend on their employer for what is perhaps life’s most essential social service makes no sense. It severely curtails one’s freedom. People cannot choose what kind of work life they want without weighing the financial and medical risks for themselves and their families of becoming, say, an entrepreneur rather than a salaried employee, or of pursuing their dream rather than taking a mind-numbing desk job.

Entrepreneurs in the Nordic countries don’t have to worry about their own health insurance at all. They already have it, they always will, and they can choose to follow their dreams at least free of that particular worry.

Americans go on churning in and out of various health-insurance plans as their jobs, finances, location, and eligibility change, but doing so is exhausting, bewildering, and an inefficient use of everyone’s time, energy, and money. Worse, insurance companies know that many of their customers will leave them for another plan at some point. As a result insurers have little incentive to cover preventive care that could save costs in the long run. For private insurers offering plans through employers, the best strategy is to pay as little as possible now—people’s future health be damned.

When one person has to put part of their own potential or dream on hold, or quash it altogether, while their spouse and children rely on that person’s sacrifice, everyone is being subtly held emotional hostage. It is just this sort of arrangement, and the tarnishing of otherwise loving relationships, that the Nordic theory of love is intended to avoid.

Today our modern expectations—in the Nordic countries as well as in much of the United States—are that individuals should have this basic independence, while still being part of families and communities. But the outdated American approach to health care undermines that ideal, and this seemed especially tragic to me because it was so unnecessary.