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

One cross-sectional study representing four million children in the US showed that roughly half of all preschoolers don’t have daily outdoor playtime,

with digital entertainment on average now eating up nearly fifty-three hours of their time every week.

with American children now being three times more likely to be medicated with stimulants and antidepressants than their European peers.

The Scandinavian countries lead the world in terms of paid parental leave, and Swedish parents get a total of 480 days, with a certain quota reserved for the mother and father, respectively, plus unpaid leave for up to three years.

That means children in the US are nearly six times more likely to be obese and nearly twice as likely to be overweight as children in Sweden.

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.