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

According to Roland Sennerstam, a pediatric specialist in Sweden, the practice makes perfect sense from a germ-management standpoint, and he recommends that both babies and older children go outside both in the morning and in the afternoon. “As a rule of thumb, you can let babies sleep outside in temperatures down to minus ten degrees [Celsius; fourteen degrees Fahrenheit]. It’s a misconception that cold temperatures make us sick,” he says. “We get sick because we contract viruses and bacteria when we spend too much time inside, stand too close to each other on the subway, and so on. The risk of getting infected is especially high at day cares, where you might have twenty children spending the whole day inside in a virtual cloud of germs.”