More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 13 - July 1, 2025
Scandinavia’s nature-centric culture, embodied in the term friluftsliv (which loosely translates to “open-air life”), is not just the sum of all outdoor activities people take part in. It’s a way of life that to this day is considered key to raising healthy, well-rounded, and eco-conscious children.
if we want children to care about nature, they need to spend time in it first.
the US ranks at the bottom of all industrialized nations when it comes to parental leave, guaranteeing only twelve weeks off after the birth of a child. If you work for the government or a private company with more than fifty employees, that is. Only a little more than half of all American moms meet those criteria, and nearly a quarter of American moms go back to work just two weeks after giving birth. Forget about pay, unless you work for an unusually generous employer.
Love that for us
most moms and dads have an idea of what they want for their children, based on their own upbringing. We pass on our ideas, belief systems, and traditions to the next generation to leave our small imprint on the world long after we’re gone. Our attitudes about parenting are thoroughly steeped in cultural norms, and our children in a way become an extension of ourselves. We try to re-create the good experiences and eliminate the bad ones, giving our children the best childhoods we can feasibly offer them.
In Sweden, friluftsliv is generally defined as “physical activity outdoors to get a change of scenery and experience nature, with no pressure to achieve or compete.”
As a result, Scandinavia is often cited as a world leader when it comes to air and water quality, cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and overall sustainability. For example, Denmark is a leading producer of renewable energy and environmentally friendly housing; Sweden recycles more than 99 percent of its household waste and is a primary exporter of “green” technology; and Norway was one of the first countries in the world to adopt a carbon tax.
What a dream
In 1997, another study that compared traditional preschools with so-called forest schools, where the children spend most of the day outside, confirmed that outdoor kids generally have fewer sick days.
“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.”
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.
Oof
For babies and toddlers who stay home with a parent, the activities are more about treating the parents’ cabin fever than about keeping the kids busy or giving them an edge over their peers.
Amen
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.
“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.”
“When your child comes to you and says he’s so ‘booored,’ give him a hug and tell him, ‘Good luck, my friend! I look forward to seeing what you get up to.’”
If you can help children love nature, they will take care of nature, because you cherish things you love. —MULLE
Separating your household waste is considered a basic civic duty, and when all is said and done, over 99 percent of the waste in Sweden is reused, recycled, composted, or incinerated to generate energy,
Goals
I’d noticed in the US that some adults had taken the Leave No Trace principles to an extreme and sometimes lectured children for infractions as small as collecting rocks or picking common flowers, telling them that “the flowers are food for the bees” and asking the classic question, “What would happen if everybody picked a rock?” Some researchers believe this strict interpretation of Leave No Trace can limit children’s opportunities to make meaningful connections with the natural world and may even exacerbate the perceived separation of humans and nature.
In one study, he showed that over 80 percent of college students had collected items like rocks, shells, or insects, or foraged for food in nature when they were younger, and that the collectors in the group perceived themselves as more connected to nature than the noncollectors.
Understanding how your own lifestyle affects your health, the environment, and society at large is considered just as important as, say, mastering math problems and knowing the difference between past and present tense.
Globally, food waste causes over three billion tons of carbon emissions every year, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. To put that in perspective, if food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the US.
In this case, it’s a friendly former professional shot-put athlete turned IT manager named David, also known as Kerstin’s dad. David is tattooed up to his neck, speaks six languages, and, as I’m just about to discover, is a storyteller extraordinaire.
Our reaction to dirt very much depends on our upbringing, social class, cultural context, and personal experiences. Attitudes toward hygiene have also shifted back and forth during different time periods.
Today, about one in ten children in the US has asthma, a disease that kills three thousand people in the country every year, and as many as 40 percent are affected by allergies. Combined, allergic disease, including asthma, is the third-most-common chronic condition among children under eighteen years old in the
More recently, studies have found that Amish children have remarkably low rates of asthma and allergies. The reason? Likely what European scientists call the “farm effect.” Breathing in the microbes found in manure from cattle and other farm animals every day is beneficial to the immune system and could explain why only 7.2 percent of the Amish children in one study had an increased risk for allergies, compared to 50 percent of the general population.
They became part of my fabric, or what Richard Louv likes to call those “special places in nature that we pick up as children and carry around in our hearts for the rest of our lives.”
They gave us a lot of freedom to explore and play on our own, which made us independent, confident, and resilient. They also put us to sleep on our stomachs, didn’t care much about bike helmets, and let us roll around in the back of the family station wagon like a bunch of human-size bowling balls while chain-smoking Marlboros (which, by the way, we were able to purchase from the store, no questions asked, by age nine approximately).
As parents, we’re wired to worry. But today, in many places, allowing children to play outside on their own has become a controversial parenting choice or, worse, criminalized.
Research also shows that three-quarters of all American parents worry that their children will get abducted, despite the fact that violent crime against children has been decreasing steadily since the 1990s and the risk of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger is so minimal—around 0.00007 percent, or one in 1.4 million annually—that experts call it effectively zero. And in a vast majority of sex abuse cases against children, the perpetrator is somebody close to the victim—a family member, relative, or acquaintance—and not a stranger off the street. Still, these numbers have done little to
...more
According to David Eberhard, chief psychiatrist at the emergency psychiatric ward in Stockholm, our brains have a tendency to overestimate two types of events that may occur to our children: those that have disastrous consequences and those that are out of our control. Both types encompass kidnapping.
Ironically, in a time when our children are statistically safer and more secure than ever, removing all perceivable risk from their lives has become a mainstream parenting strategy.
Human ecology researcher Ebba Lisberg Jensen at Malmö University believes the anxiety over so-called risky play is a result of the fact that society has become so safe and secure. “The safety becomes a little bit of a trap. We want more and more safety, and it’s just never safe enough. This is what we call ‘care anxiety,’” she says. “Once you’ve secured your children’s safety, you somehow feel like you’ve succeeded, and that in turns creates positive reinforcement.”
“As a culture, we don’t trust our children at all—we basically live their lives for them. Up until age seven or eight they’re so bubble-wrapped and helicoptered that they don’t get to practice any of their physical skills, and now there’s huge fallout.
Ellen Sandseter, an associate professor of physical education at Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Trondheim, Norway, describes risky play as “thrilling and exciting play that can include the possibility of physical injury.” She goes on to identify six different types of risky play: those involving, respectively, great heights, high speed, dangerous tools, dangerous elements, rough-and-tumble play, and disappearing/getting lost.
Simply put: Allowing some risky play actually makes children safer and less prone to injury. I think of Brussoni’s
In order to foster these traits and encourage physical activity, researchers suggest a shift from the prevailing attitude to keep children “as safe as possible” to the more nuanced approach of keeping them “as safe as necessary.”
Children are recommended to ride in a rear-facing car seat at least until their fourth birthday, and bike helmets are mandatory by law until you turn fifteen.
In Sweden, if anything is perceived to be at all dangerous, it’s usually soon regulated by decrees and laws that are supposed to make the citizens’ lives simple, secure, and safe. This shows in the statistics, as Swedish children have the fewest number of deaths by injury among all developed nations, just over five per hundred thousand children, according to UNICEF. The US comes in fourth from the bottom, with an injury death rate that is almost three times that of Sweden.
“I realized that I had to be proactive. Our mothers’ generation could be relaxed about it and just let us outside. But today in America you always have that fear that somebody will call the cops if you give your child too much freedom, so now we have to construct that reality for our children—for example, by creating nature play groups where we can set them free within the construct of what we’ve set up.”
He liked change about as much as a vegetarian enjoys a bloody steak
What an odd metaphor
Sometimes my grandmother would even photograph the plants in her garden, just to memorialize a particularly heavy bloom. In the small things in nature, she found a lifelong source of fascination and wonder.
Yes grandma
In Sweden, gardening is becoming an established form of therapy for treating mental burnout, with one project at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp successfully rehabilitating three out of four participants who had been on long-term sick leave, in some cases for as long as ten years.
Preach
Forest schools, which were unheard-of when I moved to the US, and other nature-based education initiatives are starting to pop up not only where you would expect them to—in the outdoorsy Pacific Northwest—but in the rural Midwest and the South. Since
lol PNW stereotypes
“There’s definitely a backlash in this country against the intense academic expectations for three- and four-year-olds, and that’s given rise to these forest programs,” she says. “Many parents still feel pressured, but others are saying, ‘This is not right; I can just feel it.’”
