There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  Elin Wägner, a prominent Swedish journalist and author during the first half of the twentieth century, argued that spending time in nature on an everyday basis is key to both our personal health and our spirituality, as well as to the health of the planet, long before these ideas had become widely accepted. The cultural and academic elites started to promote the idea that the Swedish people were one with nature, and in 1940 a government report for the first time recommended that public spaces in the cities be set aside for outdoor recreation. In the same report, the term allemansrätten, the right of public access, was used for the first time, even though the custom had been in place since the Middle Ages.

  After World War II, urbanization and industrialization increased, and Swedes had more leisure time and money than ever before. Nature became a source of joy rather than simply a necessity for survival, as well as a symbol of national identity, just like the flag, the national anthem, and the Swedish language. The outdoors was also depicted as a democratic meeting place where everybody was equal, rich and poor. The Swedish Tourist Association, the education system, and other institutions reinforced this new, positive view of nature by encouraging people to enjoy friluftsliv and educating children about wildlife and the environment. National parks and nature preserves were created to protect unique landscapes, and by the middle of the twentieth century fresh air had been established as a pillar of public health, which it remains today.

  In Scandinavia the belief that fresh air is good for you applies to people of all ages, not least infants. Daily fresh air is seen as essential for babies, ranking just behind food, sleep, and the nurturing love of a parent. And the most common way for them to get their fresh air is from the comfort of a pram. Scandinavian prams are a different animal than most American strollers and travel systems, which are mainly designed for portability and seamless transfers in and out of a car. If the travel systems are the baby equipment equivalent of a Prius—lightweight, small, and easy to maneuver in crowded mall parking lots—most traditional Scandinavian prams feature a heavy chassis and drive more like a sturdy Volvo on a rough mountain road. Forget about multiple cup holders and mandatory snack compartments—when Scandinavian parents shop for prams they look for big wheels, fat tires with good traction, and superior suspension that will help them conquer sleet, mud, and snow on cobblestone roads and dirt tracks alike. More important, this type of stroller, called barnvagn (“child carriage”) in Swedish, allows the baby to sleep flat on its back. This is key, since prams aren’t just used for walks around town. With their characteristic flat bottoms, they double as outdoor cribs on wheels.

  The Scandinavian practice of parking prams with young babies outside all year-round dates back at least a century. At the time, the infant mortality rate was high and indoor air quality poor, and many children suffered from rickets and other diseases. In Finland, a well-known pediatrician named Arvo Ylppö, who is sometimes referred to as that country’s Dr. Benjamin Spock, set out to change all that. In the 1920s, he started to distribute childcare guidelines to new mothers, to improve the health and survival rates among infants. Among his many recommendations was to expose children to sunlight as well as fresh and cold air regularly to create “sound blood” and prevent diseases. Specifically, cold air was believed to increase immunity against bacteria by improving blood circulation in the linings of the nose and mouth. When Ylppö died in 1992, the infant mortality rate in Finland had fallen from 10 percent in 1920 to 0.6 percent, making it among the lowest rates in the world (as of 2015, it stood at 0.2 percent).

  Ylppö is widely credited for contributing to this decline and his legacy lives on to this day, as the Finnish government still promotes outdoor napping. For example, all new parents receive an educational pamphlet titled “Having Children in Finland,” which explicitly recommends the practice: “Irrespective of the season, many children have their evening naps outside in prams. Many babies sleep better outdoors in the fresh air than in the bedroom. Sleeping outdoors is not dangerous for a baby.”

  When Maya and Nora were born, this was also one of the first Scandinavian parenting traditions that I put into practice. Just like generations of Swedes had done before me, I intuitively lined our stroller with lamb’s wool and a bunting bag, bundled the girls up in layers, and walked them around until they fell asleep. Then I would park the stroller by the wall on our back porch, turn on the baby monitor, and go back inside. The Woman Who Walks with Dogs had become the Woman Who Leaves Her Napping Baby Outside. Since I couldn’t quite shake the fear that somebody would call Child Protective Services on me, I didn’t advertise this napping regimen to anybody but close friends and family. Meanwhile in Sweden my friends were lauded for being good, caring parents for doing exactly the same thing. A friend in Stockholm, Cecilia, a feisty redhead with a contagious smile, says that she felt like exposing her two daughters to fresh air every day was among the most basic of her parenting responsibilities.

  “I was raised to think that it’s important to get fresh air every day, and that’s how I raise my daughters too,” she says. “I was under the impression that if I didn’t get my babies outside every day, people would almost think that I was a bad parent.”

  When Cecilia’s oldest daughter, Matilde, was born the temperature was hovering around five degrees (−15°C), and the prospect of taking her firstborn outside in the cold seemed a bit daunting at first. But as soon as she was comfortable in her new role as mother and it warmed up to around seventeen degrees (−8°C), she regularly started taking her baby daughter for walks in freezing temperatures and then, instead of waking her up when they returned, left the pram on the porch behind the house while she went back inside. In the winter she left a baby monitor by the pram, and in the summertime she left the door to the porch cracked.

  “Of course you check on them just like you would if they slept inside,” she says. “If it was below minus ten degrees [Celsius; fourteen degrees Fahrenheit] I didn’t put them outside by themselves, but I would still take them for walks. And if it rained I just put a rain cover on the pram and went outside anyway. You can’t let that stop you.”

  Cecilia’s daughters always took longer, deeper naps outside, and many Scandinavian parents will second that notion. “In my experience, they sleep better outside, since they get fresh air, and they also get used to sleeping with normal background noise,” says my younger cousin Josephine, whose one-year-old daughter, Valerie, has slept outdoors for up to three hours per day since she was two months old. “I also think that they stay healthier this way. At least they look healthy when they come in from their power nap in the pram with rosy cheeks, and they feel much more alert and energetic after napping outside rather than inside.”

  Of course, not all Scandinavians have a back porch on which to park a pram, or even live in an area where it would be safe to do so, but they still go to great lengths to provide their young children with a daily dose of fresh air. Those who can’t safely leave their child outside on their own can often be seen pushing a stroller around for hours, sometimes in groups, or “stroller mobs,” as Cecilia jokingly calls them. Apartment dwellers are sometimes known to park the stroller or bassinet attachment on a balcony. As it turns out, their babies too get so used to sleeping outdoors that they wouldn’t have it any other way.

  “A lot of children who are used to sleeping outside don’t want to go to sleep unless they’re in their pram,” Cecilia says. “I think they feel better both physically and mentally from being outside a lot.”

  Surprisingly little research exists about outdoor napping, but a Finnish study from 2008 did confirm that children take longer naps when they sleep outside. The study was based in the city of Oulu, Finland, where 95 percent of the parents let their babies nap outside, generally starting from when they are a couple of weeks old. The study also showed that the ideal napping temperature was perceived as twenty-one degrees (−6°C), although many parents reported that they let their charges stay outside in temperatures as low as five degrees (�
�15°C) or even colder. A majority of the parents also said that their children were “more active” and ate better after napping outside in the cold. A whopping 94 percent of the parents felt like napping outdoors was “healthy because of the fresh air.”

  I, too, had always been under the impression that outdoor napping is healthier than sleeping indoors. But is it? According to Roland Sennerstam, a pediatric specialist in Sweden, the practice makes perfect sense from a germ-management standpoint, and he recommends that both babies and older children go outside both in the morning and in the afternoon. “As a rule of thumb, you can let babies sleep outside in temperatures down to minus ten degrees [Celsius; fourteen degrees Fahrenheit]. It’s a misconception that cold temperatures make us sick,” he says. “We get sick because we contract viruses and bacteria when we spend too much time inside, stand too close to each other on the subway, and so on. The risk of getting infected is especially high at day cares, where you might have twenty children spending the whole day inside in a virtual cloud of germs.”

  Sure enough, a 1990 study of Sweden’s preschools (which essentially function like day cares) by the National Board of Health and Welfare showed that children who spent five or fewer hours outside per week at day care were sick more often than those who spent six to nine hours outside per week. 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.

  Outdoor experiences in a stimulating environment can also be a boon to the brain, which develops rapidly in the first three years of a child’s life, according to a study from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Listening to the sound of an airplane, grasping a leaf, smelling the ocean, observing colors and shapes in nature, crawling on a rough surface, and experiencing different types of weather all help form neural pathways in a baby’s brain, which essentially paves the way for learning later in life. “A baby’s brain absorbs a lot more then [sic] we realize as they try to make sense of the world through soaking up noises, sights and experiences around them,” the authors note. “Outdoor play gives an infant the opportunity to develop their senses” and “introduces the environment . . . they live in.”

  All guiding documents for preschools in Sweden guarantee children’s right to spend time outside, and even at traditional preschools in Scandinavia it’s extremely popular to let the youngest children sleep outside. Come nap time, it’s common to see a long line of prams with napping babies lined up against a wall outside, and in Denmark some preschools even have a special sheltered area with stationary pram-like bassinets where the youngest children sleep. And preschools that skimp on outdoor nap or playtime can quickly draw the ire of parents, who expect them to provide it.

  Nurses working in Sweden’s universal health care system also recommend that parents take their children outside for fresh air every day. “Some people are afraid to go outside if the weather is bad or if the child is sick,” says Lotta Bohlin, one of the country’s many nurse-midwives who provide free health checkups from when a baby is born until he or she starts school. “But unless the child is really sick we still recommend some fresh air. As long as they’re protected in the pram, it’s no problem for them to be outside with a low-grade fever. It’s important to get a little daylight every day.”

  The practice of napping and playing outdoors in almost any weather is not only common in Scandinavia—it’s viewed as key to good health and a surefire sign of sound parenting. But some things inevitably get lost in cultural translation.

  The practice of letting babies nap outdoors got a bad rap in the US with the notorious case of a Danish tourist who left her fourteen-month-old daughter in a stroller outside a restaurant in New York on a cool Saturday night in May 1997. The tourist, Anette Sørensen, and her boyfriend were having drinks at a Dallas BBQ in New York’s East Village while keeping an eye on their sleeping daughter through a window, when officers from the NYPD showed up and arrested both parents. Somebody—whether it was a waiter, a patron, or one of various passersby is not entirely clear from news reports—had noticed the girl, Liv, on the curb and notified the authorities because they were concerned about her safety. Sørensen was dumbfounded, and her attempts to explain to the police officers that letting babies nap outside is standard practice and considered healthy in her homeland went nowhere.

  After being taken to the police station, where they were strip-searched and placed in custody over the weekend, both parents were charged with child endangerment. Meanwhile, Liv was examined for signs of potential neglect and sexual abuse, and placed in temporary foster care. The charges were later dropped and Liv and her mother were reunited after four days, but the case set off a fiery debate about parenting cultures on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Parents and columnists alike weighed in on the custom of leaving babies outside shops and restaurants. Most people interviewed by the New York Times in Manhattan believed that the couple had been negligent, though some didn’t think their intent was malicious. Then-mayor Rudy Giuliani even spoke out about the case and defended the policemen’s actions, saying that they “did the right thing.” New York Times writer Clyde Haberman wryly noted that “weather reports said it was quite cold in Copenhagen yesterday, with temperatures near freezing and snow on the way. To follow Anette Sørensen’s logic, it was a grand opportunity for Danish mothers to bundle up their babies, put them in strollers and leave them outside to enjoy the bracing air while the moms stayed toasty indoors.”

  In Denmark, however, many were shocked by the treatment that Sørensen and her daughter had been subjected to. There, as Sørensen had tried to explain to the New York police officers, it’s commonplace to see babies alone in strollers outside cafés and restaurants, and the temperature on the night of Sørensen’s arrest—reportedly in the mid-fifties—was pretty tame by Scandinavian standards. Granted, weather was not the only thing at issue in the Sørensen case. Copenhagen, a low-crime city of 1.3 million mostly friendly people, is a long way from New York City. Though Sørensen’s defense lawyers described 132 Second Avenue, where the restaurant was located, as a safe tourist area, others portrayed it as rife with drugs and crime. Night was falling and it was starting to get dark while little Liv was soundly asleep outside in her stroller.

  Was it naïve of Sørensen to act the way she did, considering the circumstances? Most definitely. Irresponsible? Maybe. But criminal? By Scandinavian standards—not by a long shot. And to get hauled off by the police, have to spend two nights in jail, and get charged with child endangerment while your child is taken away from you for four days at a crucial point of her development was from a Scandinavian perspective far more shocking than the act of leaving a child outside a restaurant and watching her through the window.

  Apparently not all Scandinavians took note of the Sørensen case. In 2011, a Swedish woman in her thirties left her sleeping one-year-old child outside a Mexican restaurant in Amherst, Massachusetts, while she went inside to order a taco. According to the Swedish daily Aftonbladet, she was gone for about ten minutes and kept an eye on her baby through a window.

  In Scandinavia, this likely wouldn’t have caused any concern. But in Amherst somebody saw fit to call the cops. And even though the baby was found in good spirits and the mother was right there, the case was turned over to Child Protective Services, which planned to “investigate whether the child was in good hands”—i.e., whether the Swedish woman would pass muster as a good mother. Her defense echoed that of Sørensen’s: “This is common in Sweden and not strange at all,” she reportedly told the police when they showed up at the restaurant.

  Even though I probably wouldn’t have acted the same way Sørensen or the other woman did in that particular context, their stories are interesting because they in a way represent a microcosm of two vastly different parenting cultures, one that is slightly fanatical about getting fresh air on a daily basis, and one that is equally obsessed with safety. Eleve
n years after Sørensen was detained in jail in New York, I had found myself at the confluence of the same two parenting cultures as I gave birth to Maya and was preparing to raise her in the US.

  OUTDOOR NAPPING 101

  The secret of outdoor napping is to dress for the weather, as it’s not good for the baby to be too hot or too cold. Dress the baby the way you would dress yourself, and don’t double up on everything just because you’re dressing a child. Lastly, use good judgment when determining whether the weather permits outdoor napping.

  These tips can help get you started:

  • Very young babies should sleep on their backs in a stroller that has a flat bottom or a bassinet attachment.

  • Place the stroller near a wall and out of the wind, and make sure that the baby is protected against rain.

  • In the summer, make sure that the sun is not shining directly into the stroller.

  • Use a mosquito net to protect the baby from bugs, stray animals, and debris that may blow into the stroller.

  • In the winter, dress the baby in warm layers (preferably starting with woolen long underwear in very cold temperatures) and use a bunting bag. Lining the stroller with lamb’s wool helps insulate it.

  • Avoid over-bundling, since this can restrict airflow around the child’s face and increase the risk of sudden infant death syndrome.

  • Place a baby monitor by the stroller or crack a window, and check on the child regularly.

  An American Kid in a Swedish School

  * * *

  In Sweden, most children start something called “preschool class” the year they turn six, although this is not mandatory. (I would compare it to American kindergarten if it were not so completely different. Judging by what some older teachers in the US have told me, I imagine that it is a lot like kindergarten was thirty years ago.) Formal, mandatory schooling starts the following year, when the children turn seven and start first grade. Since Maya had essentially had formal schooling from age five, when she started all-day kindergarten in Indiana, she was a year ahead of her Swedish peers and would therefore join her older cousin Oliver in second grade.