There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  “I like that the soccer practice is rain or shine,” one mom told me after her son got back from playing soccer on a muddy gravel field on a typical spring day featuring pouring rain and forty-degree temperatures (4.4°C). “That makes them tougher. And the kids don’t care. I think the rain bothers us adults more than it bothers them.”

  Lisberg Jensen, the human ecology researcher, points out that the moral argument—that it’s healthy and strengthening for children to play outside—hasn’t always been the leading one. In the 1950s and 1960s it was customary for homemakers to send their kids outside to play regardless of the weather, simply because the mothers wanted them out of the house.

  “Mothers back then didn’t watch the kids after they turned four or five; they were supposed to go outside and play, and bad weather was no excuse for staying inside. I think it was a matter of convenience for the parents more than anything.”

  Today, parents and early childhood educators often raise other arguments for dressing kids for the weather and letting them play outside all year-round. Nature looks and acts differently depending on the season and the weather, and in order to understand these changes, you need to experience them firsthand. Plus, different types of weather inspire different types of play. Rain means that you can build canals and run your tricycle through deep puddles. Best of all, you can make mud.

  Hanna, a mom who says that she’s not really gung-ho about getting outside in inclement weather, still thinks it is important that her children experience it.

  “Often, we’ll make an activity out of it. I’ll say, ‘Let’s go outside and jump in the puddles.’ The kids love that,” she says. “Even if I think it sucks that it’s raining, I don’t want to convey that feeling to my children, because it’s more harmful to sit inside than to be outside in the rain. I don’t have a problem with them getting dirty either, either at home or at preschool. When the preschool says that they go outside every day, rain or shine, I think it’s great.”

  Another mom says that although she thinks it is easier to get outside in the summer, when it’s warm out, she insists on taking the kids outside every day, regardless of the weather. “In the summertime it feels like a victory when you stay outside all day long. In the wintertime the kids don’t always feel like going outside, and nor do I, especially if it’s dark and slushy. But then I remind them how nice it is to come inside after being outside.”

  Sweden’s forest schools are where you find some of the most enthusiastic advocates for outdoor play in all weather. I meet one of them, Anna Mållberg, while visiting the forest school outside of Borås that my friend Malin’s three children attended. The legend of Mållberg holds that she is the kind of person who won’t let anything stop her from getting outside. One day, Malin tells me, the kids wanted to eat their lunch in the forest. Not only did Mållberg single-handedly carry out all the pans and dishes to a suitable spot in the woods, she then came back for a five-year-old girl who had broken her leg and was on crutches. Since the girl was having trouble walking in the woods, Mållberg simply threw her up on her back and carried her to the lunch spot in the woods, cast, crutches, and all.

  When I visit the school, the weather couldn’t be much more idyllic. As the sun breaks through the clouds and dapples the birch trees with bright morning light, four stereotypically blond boys wearing heavy-duty rain boots are slopping around in the small, muddy creek that meanders through the property. They’re looking for critters and one of them just got lucky. “I’ve got a frog!” yells four-year-old Benny triumphantly. “Does anybody want to hold it? Come on, it’s not dangerous!”

  Benny’s older brother, Victor, who is eight, takes him up on the offer. Before too long, they have not only fashioned a ramp for the frog out of a piece of wood but also made a complete habitat for it in a bucket filled with water, rocks, and grass.

  “What do you like best here at school?” I ask Benny. “Catching frogs. Holding frogs,” he replies, stating the obvious. “Sometimes we find salamanders too,” his brother chimes in.

  “The kids here are happy, fit, strong, and full of energy,” Mållberg says heartily as we watch the frog study unfold. “We’ve never had to explain to a parent why the kids are outside. Everybody understands that it’s good for them—the fresh air, the big space. There are fewer conflicts and infections, because the kids are not on top of each other all the time. We may have a couple of cases of stomach flu, but we don’t get the epidemics that other places have. There’s also less noise. We see a lot of advantages to being outside.”

  That’s of course easy to say when it’s sunny and a balmy sixty degrees Fahrenheit, but I’m curious to find out how they handle the cold, wet season.

  “Everybody wonders how we do it in the wintertime but I think that’s the best time of the year to be outside with the kids,” Mållberg says. “The youngest children sometimes struggle with the heavy clothing, but we adjust our schedule accordingly. The temperature and the amount of precipitation are the factors that guide us. If the kids are soaked, we have to go inside, but if everybody is dry and happy, we eat outside. In the winter we change clothes a few times a day, and periodically our two drying cabinets run around the clock. But, regardless of the weather, we always go outside. If a child is not healthy enough to go outside, he or she needs to stay home. The parents know how it works. We don’t stay inside because somebody has a runny nose.”

  Mållberg has that calm, pedagogic demeanor about her that often seems to be present in those who choose a career working with children, a characteristic that I, by the way, both admire and envy. At this forest school, it seems like she has found her perfect fit. Enthusiasm for nature and being outside is not something that can be faked, especially when you are roughly on the same latitude as the Gulf of Alaska and your job description includes putting snowsuits on twenty-some toddlers and preschoolers, then following them around, looking at squirrel tracks and blueberry bushes for at least five hours a day, regardless of season or temperature.

  Suddenly, one of the other teachers rings a cowbell, which signals to the children that it’s time to gather for a morning snack, or fruit time. The children line up by a faucet on the outside of the building to wash their hands, then gather around one of the picnic tables, where Mållberg is cutting bananas in halves and apples in quarters and then doling them out to eager hands.

  “Hmmm. I wonder if Victor really washed his hands after playing with that frog,” Mållberg muses out loud to one of the other teachers after most of the kids have already finished their fruit and returned to the creek. “Oh well, a little dirt won’t hurt.”

  I try to channel the spirit of Mållberg when cooler, wetter weather rolls in once again that spring, but I’m struggling to find the enthusiasm to get outside. Then one day, as I look out the window, I see that my elderly neighbor is heading out of his house. The rain is pouring down from leaden skies, and to make matters worse, he’s on crutches. At first I assume that he’s just limping out to get the mail. Then I realize that he’s heading out for his daily—and sometimes twice daily—walk.

  That’s it. I’m going out. I throw on my rain gear and yell a cheery hello as I pass him a little farther down the road. He slows down and turns his head in my direction, visibly startled. Then he gives me a gracious nod before reverting to inspecting the pavement. Of all the times I’ve run into him during my walks, this is the first time that he’s even acknowledged my presence. It feels like a victory.

  I walk in the rain to the nature preserve down the road, where a path lined by beech and maple trees, still in their barren winter garb, takes me up a steep hill. At the top, I come upon a waterlogged clearing where the mushy ground is covered by blunt rocks and green grass. A lone knotty oak with long, twisted branches and a trunk so massive that two adults holding hands barely could reach all the way around it towers over the meadow. With its roots firmly planted in the ground, it’s been standing guard here for centuries before I was born, and it will likely still be here long afte
r I’m gone. There’s something about the way the dim afternoon light hits the old oak tree and the grayish lichens drooping from its veiny branches that makes this place feel magical. I loosen the hood of my rain jacket and pull it back, letting the rain flow freely over my face and make trickling streams on my forehead, cheeks, nose, and chin.

  My hiking boots sink down in the wet, muddy ground as I walk past the old tree and back into the forest. It feels different in the rain. Gloomier, but also more serene. Before I turn around and go home, I stop and listen to a small stream from a freshwater spring trickle through the trees. My feet are damp, but my mind is still. Silently embraced by the forest, I am alert, contented, calm. This, I think to myself, is what it feels like to be truly alive.

  Scandinavian Parenting Tip #5

  Try to embrace the weather for what it is, and let your child run wild and get dirty while playing outdoors. If possible, reserve a spot in the backyard where your child is allowed to dig in the dirt or create a simple “mud kitchen” with some old pots, pans, cups, and other kitchen utensils. If the dirt on your child’s hands and clothes bothers you, remember that in general the problem isn’t that kids today are too dirty but that they are too clean.

  Suggested reading: Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World, by B. Brett Finlay and Marie-Claire Arrieta. Algonquin Books, 2016.

  6

  * * *

  FREEDOM WITH RESPONSIBILITY

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

  —LENORE SKENAZY

  One Saturday, when the skies can’t seem to decide whether to stay in drizzle mode or open up the faucets to a full downpour, I take Nora and Kerstin, Nora’s friend from preschool, to a small local park in town. It’s the kind of day when you don’t really expect kids to flock around the monkey bars, but as I pull up in my Saab I notice two boys and a girl running down the grassy hill toward the swings. They’re all geared up in polyester rain clothes, boots, and hats, and both of the boys carry toy bows and arrows.

  “That’s Maya’s mom,” I can hear one of them say as we exit the car. I recognize him as Teddy, one of Maya’s classmates. Teddy is eight, the other boy is seven, and the girl, Teddy’s little sister, is five. And they’re here on their own. The American in me does a second take and starts to look around for the parents. The Swede in me, however, is not surprised.

  I tell them hello and make small talk while Nora and her friend get busy relocating an earthworm from the sandpit to the grass.

  “Do you come here often by yourselves?” I ask.

  “Sometimes,” Teddy responds.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Over there,” he says, pointing vaguely in a direction past the apartment complex on the north side of the playground. “In the house up the road.”

  “Where else do you go by yourselves in town?”

  “It just depends. Sometimes over here, sometimes over there,” he says, at this point clearly losing interest in my questions and turning his attention to his friends on the big spiderweb swing.

  After a while, they take off, on to new adventures. It was an ordinary scene, one that I had seen played out many times before. After all, I used to be that five-year-old girl exploring the neighborhood and the woods behind our house with my friends. Yet on this rainy day in Sweden it struck me as oddly extraordinary.

  The year before, on April 12, 2015, two American children, ten-year-old Rafi Meitiv and his six-year-old sister, Dvora, had also been playing without their parents at a park about a mile from the family’s home in suburban Maryland. Except they didn’t make it home. Instead, on their way back from the park, they got picked up by the police and were handed over to Child Protective Services. After holding the children in custody for several hours, CPS eventually notified the parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, and proceeded to charge them with child neglect, referring to a Maryland law that makes it illegal to leave a child under the age of eight unattended in a building or vehicle. The Meitivs had been investigated by CPS once before, in December 2014, after somebody had spotted the children walking home from a different local park and called the police.

  The Maryland case sparked outrage and a national debate about child safety, government overreach, and so-called free-range parenting. The Meitivs’ case is perhaps the most publicized incident in which parents have come under suspicion from CPS for letting their children play unsupervised, but it’s far from the only one. “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,” says Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement, who has defended the Meitivs and other parents on her popular blog. “Also, because the kids don’t have their parents with them, people automatically think that the parents are bad, because only bad parents put their kids in danger. What I’ve been trying to do by highlighting these cases is point out that this was the norm a generation ago, and just because the kids are outside unsupervised doesn’t mean that they’re in danger. It just means that their parents trust them and their community.”

  The Meitivs were eventually cleared of both charges, and state officials clarified that playing or walking alone is not reason for CPS to get involved “unless children have been harmed or face a substantial risk of harm.” But the debate about their parenting choices kept raging in the media, with news outlets inviting readers to weigh in on whether the case constituted neglect or not. Although a majority seemed to think CPS had overstepped its bounds, there were also quite a few people who thought the parents had been irresponsible for letting the children walk alone. Amid the debate, the media attempted to explain the “controversial” parenting technique known as “free range parenting.”

  Or, as it is also known in Scandinavia, “parenting.”

  If you hear people mention the term free-range in Scandinavia, they are most likely talking about egg-laying hens. What in the US has become a parenting subculture devoted to consciously letting your children play or walk unsupervised outside is viewed in Sweden as a normal part of children’s growth and development. That doesn’t mean Scandinavian parents just open the front door one day and let their toddlers loose on the street. Just as Vygotsky’s “scaffolding” gradually enables a child to get to the next stage of learning, many parents live by the notion that children need a certain amount of freedom—both freedom of movement and freedom to take reasonable risks while playing—in order to become independent, confident human beings. To gain more freedom, you have to demonstrate that you are responsible enough to get to the next level. In Sweden, parents logically call this “freedom with responsibility.”

  In order to understand this common parenting tenet, it helps to know that independence, resilience, and self-esteem are highly coveted qualities in children in Scandinavia. Unlike academic facts, these qualities can’t be taught; they must be learned through firsthand experience over time. It’s also a commonly held belief among parents and educators that young children practice these skills best by playing freely in nature.

  “I think playing in nature is great for children’s development. They become so independent and trusting in their own abilities,” says Linda, whose three children have all attended a nature-based after-school program. “Nobody will help you up on that big rock—you have to get up by yourself. And when your body is ready for it, you will.”

  This attitude is common across Scandinavia, as both parents and early childhood educators have traditionally had a higher tolerance for children’s risk-taking than in the US. “In Denmark, parents try to intervene only when it is absolutely necessary,” 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. “They trust their children to be able to do and try new things and give them space to build their own trust of themselves.”

  In preschool, learning
to stay within eyesight of the teachers in the forest, a place where there are no man-made boundaries, fosters both independence and self-control. Instead of being confined by a fence, the children learn to adhere to natural borders, like a fallen log, a creek, a steep hill, and so on. Of all children, none seem more apt at mastering their environment than the children who go to nature-based preschools. The first time I watched a two-year-old boy at a forest school amble around on top of a rather high rock wall, it was nerve-wracking. It wasn’t exactly like he was teetering on the edge of the Grand Canyon, but the drop-off was high enough that he could have gotten injured had he fallen off. The preschool teacher in charge of him, however, remained completely calm.

  “He knows where he can go and where he can’t,” she said when I voiced my concern. “They learn surprisingly quickly how much they can handle.”

  Several other forest school teachers have told me similar things.

  “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.”

  At home, Swedish children may hone these skills first by playing in the backyard without adult supervision and then, as they get older, around the neighborhood in the company of older children. Once they reach school age, many start walking or riding their bikes to school and each other’s houses. The kids that we saw at the playground that rainy Saturday were no anomaly: Every time I drove through town—and the countryside, too, for that matter—I saw children either playing outside without adults or moving about by themselves on foot or by bike.

  A study of a midsize city in southern Sweden showed that 74 percent of fourth graders there either walked or rode their bikes to school, while 21 percent were chauffeured, either by bus or car. Although more children today get a ride to school than was the norm thirty years ago, the study notes that school-age children in Sweden have among the highest physical activity in the world. PE and organized sports contribute to some of this activity, but the most active children were the ones that played the most with their friends outside. Other everyday activities such as traveling independently to school, running errands, and doing chores like walking the dog also contributed to overall activity. Or, as the study notes, “good levels of physical activity reflect a varied everyday life at large in which they play and move about on their own accord.”