There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge)

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

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.