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

Suggested reading: Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting, by Carl Honoré. HarperOne, 2009.

“So you expect to be able to park exactly where you’re going? You’ve gotten way too comfortable.”

School forests are sections of woods that can be used by schools and preschools for outdoor play and environmental education, and in Sweden there are over one thousand of them.

“There are certain parts of the brain that are stimulated when we move around and have fun in a varied environment. We turn on our intuition when we go outside—and we need to do it more often.”

The opening of Mulleborg, which translates to “Fort of Mulle,” had a ripple effect, and today there are more than two hundred forest schools in Sweden and thousands more internationally, sometimes under names like nature kindergarten, nature-based preschool, outdoor school, forest kindergarten, Waldkindergarten, and bush school.

Today environmental education is a mandated part of the national curriculum not only for preschool but also for grade school in Sweden.

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.

The kids in Maya’s class were noticeably proud of this achievement. “We don’t waste any food at our school,” one of the boys had casually informed me while we were waiting in line to get served, while another girl had chimed in, “We don’t take more than we can eat.” Winning a citywide contest had proven to be an incredibly effective way to inspire change and make the students own it. “We’ve seen a lasting effect of the competition,” says Chatrine, who handles much of the school’s environmental education, when I catch her after school one day. “They influence each other and remind each other not to take more than they can eat.”

Have baker choose her portion sizes

Why go inside when it rains? That’s when the mud makes the best globs. —SWEDISH OUTDOOR ASSOCIATION

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. Before the eighteenth century, neither parents nor doctors in the Western world cared much about personal hygiene; in fact, many people believed dirt protected children against disease. In France, for example, washing a child’s head was even believed to hurt his intelligence, and leaving a layer of dirt was believed to protect against injury. In Sweden a couple of hundred years ago, it was standard practice to bathe your whole body only once a year, usually around Christmas.

The highest rates of allergy and asthma are found in the English-speaking developed countries: Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. 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 US. Meanwhile, asthma and allergy remain very rare conditions in many developing countries. The changes have happened too fast to have been caused by a genetic shift in the population; instead, the culprit is likely a variety of environmental factors. Many researchers believe that smaller family sizes, increased antibiotics use, less contact with animals, more time spent indoors, and an obsession with cleanliness have all contributed to our immune systems slacking off in the past fifty years.

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.

Some research suggests that low- or nonpathogenic strains of mycobacteria can help regulate the immune system and protect against allergic hypersensitivity. One of them, Mycobacterium vaccae, seems to have the ability to trigger our serotonin production, effectively making us happier and more relaxed. M. vaccae occurs naturally in soil and water, and is inhaled or ingested when we come in contact with dirt. Our exposure to mycobacteria has decreased considerably due to sanitation and water treatment in Western urban areas, but by regularly playing outside or helping out with a backyard garden, children can still get in contact with it. A recent study on mice also revealed that M. vaccae can improve cognitive functions, like learning. When researchers Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, fed the bacterium to one group of mice, they were able to navigate through a difficult maze twice as quickly as the control group while being half as stressed. After the mice were taken off the M. vaccae diet, the effect of the bacterium gradually tapered off for about three weeks, at which point it disappeared. The researchers speculated that the M. vaccae not only helped the mice feel less anxious but also made them concentrate better. “Gardeners inhale these bacteria while digging in the soil, but they also encounter M. vaccae in their vegetables or when soil enters a cut in their skin,” Matthews told Therapeutic Landscapes Network after the results fr...

“Mud gives you tactile input. The extra bonus is that when you’re digging and carrying heavy buckets, you’re getting proprioceptive input in your joints and muscles and that overrides the feeling of light touch, which feels yucky to some children. With practice and repetition, they’re going to be able to tolerate getting muddy.”

In nature, you can hear the birds sing and figure out where your body is in space. Also, it’s going to be more calming, even though you’re in an alert state. Calm but alert is actually the perfect state for sensory integration to happen.”

The idea that it is good for children to play outside in all types of weather—assuming that they have proper gear—is pretty unique to the Nordic countries, and it applies to adults too. Ask a Scandinavian, “Why would you want your child to go outside when it rains?” and she’ll likely respond, “Why not?”

You don’t remember the times your dad held your handle bars. You remember the day he let go. —LENORE SKENAZY

“Seeing kids playing outside unsupervised has become so rare in a lot of parts of America that people immediately call the authorities because they think the kids are in danger,”

Yepp

write Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Sandahl in The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids.

“The more time they spend in nature, the better they become at self-control,” says Maria Mårtensson, a forest school teacher in Stockholm. “You can tell that they have a good grasp on their own ability, because they don’t get themselves into situations that they can’t handle.”

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a scenic walk. Nature is everywhere when you’re outside, even just the wind blowing in your face.”

Cecilia, whose family owns a summerhouse on an island in the archipelago outside Stockholm, knew how to drive her parents’ motorboat by herself by the time she was six. In the summertime, she and her brother, who is three years her senior, would take the boat out to a smaller island together, where they would grill hot dogs and hang out on their own. “Mom thought it was better for us to go to the small island rather than somewhere on the main island, in case we accidentally started a fire,” she says, and laughs.

The researchers brought this shift to light through a series of experiments in which participants were asked to judge the level of risk associated with leaving a child unsupervised in five different hypothetical scenarios. The ages of the children and the circumstances during which they were left were the same in all the studies, but the parent’s reason for leaving the child varied. In some cases, the hypothetical parent had left the child unintentionally or to go to work, in other cases to relax or to rendezvous with a secret lover. As it turned out, participants consistently rated the situation as more dangerous to the child when the reason for the parent’s absence was deemed morally unacceptable—for example, seeing a lover. “People don’t only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral.

“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. Public kindergarten teachers are reporting that kids don’t even have the hand strength to hold a pencil. Eighteen-year-olds are in physical therapy because they don’t have any upper-body strength.

When Sandseter reviewed several studies on risky play, she found that children who played unsupervised or had independent mobility are more physically active and have better social skills than their peers.

risky play is nature’s way for children to teach themselves emotional resilience and learn how to manage and overcome their fears.

“The story is both ironic and tragic. We deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger, but in the process we set them up for mental breakdowns,” he writes in Psychology Today. “In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing such play than by allowing it. And, we deprive them of fun.”

“I think a good approach is to constantly challenge yourself, because this comes down to what you can handle as a parent, not what your child can handle.”