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

she thinks 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.

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.

Hanscom believes the rise in sensory issues in children is directly linked to the fact that children play less outside.

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.

She notes that children need movement and frequent breaks throughout the day in order to learn effectively or they will start to fidget and lose focus. “In order for children to learn, they must be able to pay attention. And ...

To prevent academic failure, parents feel the need to carefully engineer every aspect of their children’s lives, from introducing early academics and scheduling enrichment activities like music and science classes, to pushing children in competitive sports and pressuring them to excel in school, where from an early age they are subjected to high-stakes testing and the stress of getting good grades.

I felt like asking her when she thought her daughter would ever get a chance to “just be” again, but I shut my mouth.

For most people the answer to that question is “when they retire.” Of course, by that time, the irresistible urge to jump in muddy puddles just to see how filthy you can get is probably long gone.

“I think that’s enough,” Sara says. As a teacher and herself a high achiever in school, she clearly cares about her children’s education and future. But she also likes to give them the time and space to play. “I personally don’t like having things scheduled after work and I think that having too many activities after school stresses the kids out too. When I get back at four thirty I just want to kick back and be with my family.”

“If my son wants to play soccer he can, but I’ll never make him. It has to come from him, and it will when he’s ready for it,” Maggan says. “Not everybody likes team sports, and if he doesn’t, we’ll have to find something that’s a better fit.”

Of those who start too early, many are burned-out and lose interest by the time they are twelve, according to Hansi Hinic, a researcher at Halmstad University in Sweden, who specializes in the psychological effects of organized sports on children.

Parents book up their kids’ schedules and push them because they care. But if they’re not receptive to their children’s signals, they may be missing them,”

Kids shouldn’t get enrolled in organized sports until they want to themselves,” he says. “Sometimes you’ve got to wonder if it isn’t the parent that wants the child to start playing soccer, more than the child himself.”

Another advantage of having less structured and more child-led activities is that it can improve children’s executive functioning. Essentially, this makes them better able to delay gratification, show self-control, and set and reach their own goals.

Overscheduling children, whether it is with organized sports, clubs, or other adult-led activities, also means that they are missing out on the benefits of being bored. Too many stimuli means little time for the mind to rest and recover.

Your Competent Child: Toward New Basic Values for the Family,

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.’”

Remember that a preschooler needs very few things besides ample time to play freely, and that filling his or her schedule with a litany of “enriching” activities can do more harm than good.

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.”

Many cultures in the industrialized world are dominated by an anthropocentric view of nature. They see nature almost as a detached entity, something that is mainly there for humans to master and extract resources from.

Other cultures subscribe to the idea that humans are stewards of nature and all other living beings, and in some cases that this responsibility is bestowed on us by a divine creator.

Following this logic, if you harm nature, in the end you also harm yourself.

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.

Collecting is technically a violation of Leave No Trace, which says that you should “leave what you find” in nature, but Beery believes that it can be done responsibly and lead to a dialogue about environmental stewardship. “For example, when we collect tadpoles from the pond, what’s our responsibility to keep them alive and get them back where they belong after we learn a bit about them?”

Of course if we’re talking about an endangered species that has a very fragile habitat, that’s a place where we don’t play. There are places where we don’t build our forts. That’s a given. But I think we’ve started overusing the idea of Leave No Trace in the context of children’s play spaces in nearby nature.”

Leave No Trace is really about promoting land ethics. It’s not saying that you should never, ever have an impact when you’re going out and recreating. It’s more about reducing that impact and knowing what it does.”

instead of having their morning gathering on an alphabet rug on the floor of a classroom, they are sitting on cushy pads in a teepee, seeking warmth from a fire that is burning in the middle.

The premise behind the forest school philosophy was simple: Stimulate children’s physical, cognitive, and social development by spending as much time as possible in nature, every day, all year-round.

At forest school, nature becomes a classroom with no walls, where children learn through self-directed play by using their whole bodies and all of their senses, in an environment that nurtures their curiosity and strengthens their self-esteem.

When I ask the kids, they all say that they like the food, but can’t explain why.

Perhaps what’s most noticeable about school lunch in Sweden—and maybe why the kids like it so much—is that none of the food is prepackaged, not even the milk, and there is little to no processed food or refined sugar.

This reminds me of conversations I had with Maya’s teachers back in the US. “If it doesn’t look like it came out of the microwave, the kids won’t eat it,” one teacher had complained to me.

“The pasta, bread, milk, fruit, vegetables, cheese—it’s all organic. It’s almost harder to think of things that we buy that are nonorganic than organic,” says Eva, the cafeteria worker.

Suggested reading: Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education, by David Sobel. Orion Society, 1999.

The farther removed humans were from what he called the original “state of nature,” the more morally corrupted and decadent they would inevitably become.

Improved sanitation, combined with the invention of penicillin in the 1940s, successfully helped to drastically reduce the spread of infectious disease, in Sweden and elsewhere. Soon thereafter, however, incidences of allergy and asthma started climbing in the entire industrialized world, reaching epidemic levels in the past thirty years.

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 a...

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 v...

When the immune system is not challenged enough, it might start looking for stuff to do, like overreacting to things that are not really dangerous, like pollen and peanuts. This is believed to cause allergies, asthma, eczema, childhood diabetes, and inflammation later in life.

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 c...

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 ...

A recent study on mice also revealed that M. vaccae can improve cognitive fu...

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,”

The Dirt Cure: Growing Healthy Kids with Food Straight from Soil.

It turns out that all the things that are messy and dirty in the world, the very things we thought we needed to control or even eliminate to stay alive, are actually the very elements necessary for robust health,” she writes.