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

Most of what children need to learn during their early childhood years cannot be taught; it’s discovered through play. —RUTH WILSON

The preschool that her older son goes to is a parent cooperative that has a play-based approach to learning, with plenty of field trips, sensory bins, and hands-on experiments mixed in with traditional academics. At least it tries to. Lately, the teachers had come under pressure from the public school to adapt to the ever-increasing requirements of kindergarten. Parents, too, feared that socializing, playing, singing, and learning how to be a good friend didn’t do enough to prepare their prodigies for what was to come. Some even felt like they had no choice but to move their children to other preschools that focused more on academics.

Bowing to the pressure from the school district and from disgruntled parents, the teachers at the parent cooperative recently started handing out weekly homework assignments to the four-year-olds. This was by no means unique for this preschool, just a symptom of a national trend of putting more and more pressure on three- and four-year-olds to learn academic facts. If kindergarten was the new first grade, as some educators claimed, it certainly seemed like preschool had become the new kindergarten.

“When we went to preschool, it used to be all about playing and sitting in a circle and singing songs,” one mom, an elementary school teacher, told me. “Parents still think they’re sending their kids to kindergarten so they can learn how to share and take turns, but that’s just not how it is anymore.” “These hands-on activities are great fun and all that, but I just don’t see how that’s going to get them ready for kindergarten,” another mother said, voicing her concern about the direction of the preschool. And then, ominously, “I guess we’ll find out at kindergarten screening.”

When I asked a kindergarten teacher about the screening process, she assured me that it was not a high-stakes test that would make or break my daughter’s future, but rather an assessment tool that was used to determine whether a child was developmentally ready for kindergarten, and whether he or she might need extra assistance in the classroom. The teacher also told me she thought preschool should be about having fun and doing “all the things that we don’t have time for in kindergarten, like playing, painting, singing, reading stories, and playing games.” That took care of my concern about kindergarten screening, but the more I learned about actual kindergarten, the more I fretted about enrolling Maya.

Preschools in Scandinavia are different from those in the US since they generally offer full-time or part-time care all year-round for children who are as young as one year old. The model is sometimes called “educare,” because the purpose of the preschools here is to simultaneously educate and care for children whose parents work outside the home. Since that is most parents, a vast majority of Scandinavian children (as many as 84 percent in Sweden) between the ages of one and five are enrolled in preschool.

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.

Although preschools in Sweden are funded by the central government, they can be owned and operated directly by local municipalities, private businesses, or parent cooperatives. Regardless, they are required to have a certified preschool teacher in charge, and they all follow the same national curriculum. Part of the reason why parents in Sweden are so contented with the preschool system is probably that this national curriculum...

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document’s word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word play thirteen times, language twelve times, nature six times, and math five times. But there is not a single mention of literacy o...

In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn’t start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because “their monolithic culture values reading.” They have something else in common: their commitment to play in the early years.

There is no unanimous, internationally recognized definition of play, but the British organization Play England calls it a “process that is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated,” noting that “all children and young people need to play. The impulse to play is innate. Play is a biological, psychological and social necessity, and is fundamental to the healthy development and well-being of individuals and communities.”

children’s legal right to play and learn outside, both in planned environments, like the school yard, and natural environments, like the forest. This applies to preschools in the country as well as in the city. Urban preschools that lack natural environments in the school yard meet this requirement by simply taking the children to a public green space, like a park or nearby woods, on foot or via public transportation.

some of the parks are within a five-minute walk of the preschool, occasionally the children walk up to forty-five minutes to get to their destination, with the youngest ones taking turns using the preschool’s two double strollers. “Some people think that spending time at the park is the most important thing, but a lot of things can happen on the way. Sometimes we find acorns, chestnuts, or a really interesting beetle. The way to the park is an important part of the experience,” Ramning says.

A survey of a hundred preschools in Stockholm showed that the average time spent outside was one and a half hours per day—on a bad-weather day in the winter. On a nice day in the summer, the average was nearly six hours.

In Sweden all the supplies needed for activities and daily operations are provided by the school. They don’t need more markers—what they want is children who can play outside in all types of weather. Which prompts this list of recommended supplies for winter: • Thick mittens (two pairs) • Woolen socks • Winter coveralls • Thick sweater/fleece • Warm hat • Rain gear • Rain boots • Complete change of clothes for indoor use And, at the end, a cheery reminder: “We go outside rain or shine!”

The first children show up at six thirty in the morning. Breakfast is served around eight, then the kids play until ten, when everybody gathers for circle time and a morning snack (universally referred to as “fruit time,” since fresh fruit is the go-to snack for Swedish preschools). After that, it’s time for outdoor play until lunch. This is followed by rest or naps for the youngest children, and story time for the older ones. The afternoon is mostly devoted to unstructured play—during the warmer months, usually outside again—or projects in smaller groups, broken up by a snack at two thirty. The last child leaves the facility at five in the evening.

A photo of four children wearing orange high-visibility vests in the forest is captioned, “We look for treasures in nature and check what is hiding underneath the leaves.” Another picture shows three boys building a house out of a cardboard box. “Collaboration,” the caption reads. “Helpfulness,” says another caption, next to a photo of a boy helping a girl slice a sausage. As we sit down on the floor for fruit time, I make another observation: None of the children in the room are overweight.

“We want our children to learn in a fun way,” Ellen explains later. “We don’t sit and teach the children to count to ten, but we use math constantly. For example, when we have circle time, they take turns counting how many children are here. We also incorporate science through simple experiments. Sometimes we bring in natural objects like rocks and sticks and test which ones float in a bucket of water. If we have snow, we might bring some inside and see what happens when it melts and we pour the water through a coffee filter. And of course they use physics every time they build something.”

“Well, we usually notice when the children become interested in writing and then we give them little notebooks that they can use. The idea is that it will come naturally when they’re ready for it. It’s a lot easier for them to learn when they have that intrinsic motivation.”

Plato said that “the most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.”

Much later, in the 1700s, Swiss-born Renaissance philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau championed the idea that all education of children should be based on play in his groundbreaking treatise Émile, or On Education. “Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it,” he famously wrote, in support of children’s innate ability to learn through their own experiences. Then, in the 1830s, a German teacher and staunch nature lover named Friedrich Froebel picked up on the idea that play is key to children’s physical, moral, and spiritual development. He was so convinced of this idea that he decided to create an early childhood education program that revolved around singing, dancing, gardening, self-directed play, and experiencing nature with al...

In a classroom setting, Piaget believed the learning process was more important than the end product, and that children can learn problem-solving skills only through active discovery. Vygotsky held that children’s cognitive development is heavily influenced by their culture and that they learn primarily by playing and interacting with older and more skilled children and adults. He is mostly known for his theory about the zone of proximal development, according to which one should respect each child’s individual space and readiness to learn a new concept.

Parents and preschool teachers can do this by providing the “scaffolding” for development and giving the child just enough help to build his or her confidence to climb to the next level, without pushing or carrying. By giving children this space, adults allow them to develop self-esteem and learn to solve their own problems.

“It’s two completely different ways of looking at it. You either view children as empty containers, waiting to be filled by adults through teaching, or you believe that they have the innate capability to learn together with others. In Sweden we have faith in the child’s own curiosity and desire to learn. We call this concept ‘the competent child.’”

“Some children become interested in writing early, and when that’s the case we encourage them. It may be that they’re involved with pretend play and want to make tickets for something. In that case, the writing has a purpose. Otherwise they may just end up drawing lines that have no meaning to them,” she says.

Part of the explanation can likely be found in education reforms that have increased the academic requirements for kindergarten beginning in the 1980s and further exacerbated by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and, most recently, the Common Core State Standards, according to the advocacy group Alliance for Childhood.

Although child-centered early education models can be found in the US through the Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia approaches, “teacher-led instruction in kindergartens has almost entirely replaced the active, play-based, experiential learning that we know children need from decades of research in cognitive and developmental psychology and neuroscience,” the group notes. And now pre-K is suffering from the ripple effects.

“Most people are unaware of the need in early childhood for play,” she says. “I think the teachers themselves want the children to learn through play, so they have to explain to the parents how important it is. When people are clamoring for more academics, I don’t think most of them want their kids to sit down all day. Unfortunately, by kindergarten they are expected to do that.”

Kids can play for hours with extremely simple means. In fact, researchers have found that children play even more creatively when they don’t have ready-made toys at hand. Play is about as universal as it comes—it crosses all cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. What differs, Vandermaas-Peeler has found, is the value that various cultures place on play.

“In Denmark, play is valued for its own sake, whereas for many American parents it’s more about building skills and how it will help us later. That’s just how we’re culturally oriented, unfortunately. There are probably some good things and bad things about all of this, but there are so many opportunities for children in Denmark that are different. More freedom to choose, less structure. You choose and we help you figure it out.”

Scandinavian parents seem remarkably unconcerned about formal instruction for preschoolers. They are confident that their children will learn what they need to learn when they are ready to learn it, and are happy to “just” let their preschoolers play. Preferably outside.

“We see childhood as an important part of a human’s life and not as a race to adulthood. We believe and respect the fact that children have the right to a happy childhood.”

“I expect them to be children,” he says. “Soon enough they’ll be in school and they’ll get the rest there. All children are so different too. Some are interested in doing math and reading and writing early; others are not.”

A study that compared two groups of children in New Zealand who started their formal literacy lessons at ages five and seven, respectively, showed no significant difference in reading ability by the time they were eleven years old. But the children who had started at five had developed a less positive attitude to reading and had worse text comprehension than the children who had started when they were seven. Other studies have shown no significant association between the age a child starts school and his or her reading ability.

putting pressure on young children to read early can actually limit other aspects of their learning that may be more important, like spontaneous exploration and discovery.

Testing creativity and problem-solving skills is arguably harder than testing factual knowledge, but the results of two separate studies conducted by MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, show that teaching children too much too early can backfire.

At MIT, the researchers gave a group of four-year-olds exactly the same toy, and only varied the method with which they introduced it to the children. In one group, the researcher acted naïve and clueless when she demonstrated one of the functions of the toy, whereas the other group was given direct instruction by the researcher on how to use it. When left alone with the toy, all the children in the study were able to replicate what the “teacher” had done—pull on one of the toy’s tubes to make it squeak—but the children in the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its f...

education in the early years should focus on supporting children’s curiosity and sense of wonder, and getting them excited about the world around them. As luck would have it, there is a perfect place for this: nature.

“And they play differently outside. The games are more open and flexible, and it’s easier for them to organize the situation in a way that’s beneficial to them physically, socially, and psychologically.”

but more so in nature, where children tend to engage in a lot of fantasy play.

As a parent, a great way to support them is simply to spend a lot of time outside, ask open-ended questions, and encourage your child’s innate curiosity and willingness to investigate.

“Outside children are constantly moving, they are active. Active children learn better and more,” writes Ylva Ellneby, a veteran preschool teacher and author in Sweden, in one of her popular books about early childhood. “Children need to use their imagination and nature gives them the freedom and inspiration that is required to make it happen. . . . The woods and fields offer many adventures and magical experiences.”

Nature activates all the senses, but without being overwhelming. When children play in nature, they tend to be calm yet alert. “When their senses are engaged, they are strengthening their sensory skills. And strong sensory integration results in a higher incidence of learning,” says Angela Hanscom,

Hanscom recommends as much as five to eight hours of active play every day, preferably outdoors, for toddlers and preschoolers, and four to five hours of physical activity and outdoor play for school-age children up to the age of thirteen.

“In order for children to learn, they must be able to pay attention. And in order to pay attention, children need to move,” she says.

“Nature invites authentic play—the best kind of play for young children. Authentic play is fun, open-ended, self-directed and freely chosen. Authentic play occurs naturally when children and nature are brought together,” she writes in her book Nature and Young Children: Encouraging Creative Play and Learning in Natural Environments.

(In line with Sweden’s tradition of equal treatment of the genders, Girl Scout and Boy Scout organizations here merged in the 1960s and ’70s, with the result that all troops are coed.)

A study by the University of Copenhagen showed that children actually got more exercise while playing freely outdoors than when they participated in organized sports.

Moreover, when Ingunn Fjørtoft, a professor at Telemark University in Porsgrunn, Norway, compared five- to seven-year-olds at three different kindergartens in Norway, she found that those who played in the forest daily had significantly better balance and coordination than children who only played on a traditional playground. Once again, the reason is believed to be that children are faced with more complex physical challenges in nature, and that this boosts their motor skills and overall fitness.

“Children who spend a lot of time in nature have stronger hands, arms, and legs and significantly better balance than children who rarely get to move freely in natural areas. In nature children use and exercise all the different muscle groups,” Ellneby, the preschool teacher, notes. “Children will themselves choose to exercise their joints and muscles, if only given the opportunity.”