There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  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. Even so, the study notes that “the likelihood of a child dying from intentional or unintentional injury is small and becoming smaller” across the developed world, despite parents worrying more than ever.

  Just as Scandinavians generally feel safe in nature, many parents think that playing in the local neighborhood is safe for children, especially in smaller towns where the social trust is high and traffic is less of a problem. It’s also a practical issue. Children need several hours of physical activity every day to stay healthy, and for many families it’s neither feasible nor desirable for a parent to constantly tag along.

  When I ask Hanna, who lives in an apartment in Halmstad, a city of sixty thousand residents, why she and her partner have made a point of letting their seven-year-old daughter, Siri, play unsupervised with other kids at the neighborhood playground, she says that they see it as a way to build her confidence and make her more independent. “I want Siri to be able to play out here and feel like this is her street and that she’s safe out here. If she feels safe, I feel safe,” Hanna says. “She knows she’s not allowed to leave the area, not even with a friend, without telling us. We haven’t talked to her about perverts yet, because we don’t want her to start distrusting everybody, but she knows that she has to stay near our house. And we trust her—she doesn’t go anywhere.”

  In bigger cities, where there is generally less social trust and more traffic, parents tend to be more protective and more likely to give their children a ride to school than was the case a generation ago. But there are also forces at work trying to reverse this trend. In Gothenburg, a city of half a million people, the streets and traffic department recently mailed out a brochure encouraging parents to let their children walk to school by themselves. “In our effort to be good parents, we sometimes forget that children actually can handle a lot by themselves. Like walking to school,” the first spread of the colorful booklet states. “Children actually learn a lot when they are allowed to explore the neighborhood on their own, take responsibility for being on time, and plan things with their friends.” In addition to appearing in the brochure, the message aired as a commercial at local movie theaters. It may seem odd that the local government would try to influence parents’ decision on whether to give their kids a ride to school. But it has good reason to. More parents driving their kids to school means more traffic around the school, leading to a greater risk that a child on foot or on a bike will get hurt. Ironically, what many parents perceive as the safest option for their kids is making the area around the school less safe for other children.

  Mathias, a father of three who lives in central Gothenburg, really liked the brochure and commercial from the city and says they sparked conversation for him and his friends. “I think it will make more parents reevaluate how they look at traffic sense, cars, and safety in general. And I like the idea of children learning things by gradually figuring out how to get around on their own.” Mathias, who usually bikes with his kids to school, says his ten-year-old son, Nelson, has free range within a mile-wide radius from the home, and his eight-year-old son, Dante, is allowed the same mobility when he’s with his older brother, whereas Otis, who is seven, is allowed to play by himself on the street but is not to go any farther than that. “I think we’re somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to the amount of freedom we give our kids,” Mathias says.

  Eberhard, the psychiatrist, who himself is a father of eight, let his children start walking to school by themselves at age seven, in Stockholm, a city of over one million people. This is not necessarily the norm anymore, but by the time they’re in second or third grade, it’s not unusual for children even in the biggest cities in Scandinavia to ride public transportation by themselves, and many still walk or ride their bike to their after-school activities. In contrast, when Lenore Skenazy let her nine-year-old son ride the subway home on his own in New York City, she was chastised for her decision and dubbed “America’s worst mom,” eventually spurring her to found the Free-Range Kids movement in the US.

  Young children naturally need protection in order to survive, but Eberhard believes the level of risk in children’s lives should be increased steadily in order to successfully prepare them for adulthood. “Children are not going to be children for the rest of their lives,” he says. “If you overprotect them and don’t let them take risks and have a certain amount of responsibility, they’ll have a shock when they head out into the world later. This is not something you learn overnight; this is something you have to learn gradually. There’s a high risk that children won’t learn how to behave in traffic and in nature if they don’t learn this early.”

  Small children should be served small portions of risk, but they, too, need to explore the world, Eberhard says. Having said that, he is careful to point out that he does not advocate letting toddlers out willy-nilly without supervision. It’s all about taking baby steps, using good judgment, and practicing often. “We need to understand that children, too, are different individuals. What goes for one child doesn’t necessarily go for another,” he says, and adds that his own children don’t all enjoy the same privileges or go by the same rules at the same age. “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.”

  Skenazy believes that challenging yourself to allow your children to have unsupervised time can be just as beneficial to the parents as it is to the kids. “Parents need to experience what it’s like to let go of their kids and not have them supervised for a little bit of time, for them to realize that it’s not the end of the world,” she says. “The ones who are afraid to do it are afraid because in their mind they ask themselves, ‘What if?’ I call this ‘worst first’ thinking. You come up with the worst-case scenario first and proceed as if it’s likely to happen.”

  The Freest Kids in the World?

  * * *

  Just a two-minute walk from the Shack is another small red 1800s homestead that’s owned by the local church. I had noticed that the traffic on our normally quiet road increased exponentially every Wednesday a little before six o’clock at night, and then again at seven thirty, and sometimes I would hear children’s voices through the trees. When I take a closer look at the woods one day, I discover signs of human activity throughout. Large tripods made from long, straight tree branches that have been lashed together with meticulous knots. Rustic, low-slung shelters with names carved on the inside walls. Multiple fire pits with blackened leftover pieces of wood strewn about.

  Something was going on up there. But what?

  One Wednesday night, while Maya is at choir practice, Nora and I walk up the road toward the homestead, where a tall man with a long ponytail stands in a circle with about forty children ranging from about nine to sixteen years old. He waits patiently until all the children are quiet and standing completely still with their right hands raised.

  “Hello, Scouts!” he yells.

  His name is Magnus, and like many others he joined the Scouts when he was nine years old, back when scouting and soccer were more or less the only after-school activities available to the kids here. A few years ago, he chose to come back as a leader. He says that even though today’s parents are more likely to give their kids a ride to activities in the big city, the scouting tradition remains remarkably strong.

  “The parents think it’s a good thing. They have nice memories of it themselves, and they like that we’re outside a lot,” Magnus, who is in his early forties, says. “We’re actually outside more now than when I was in
the Scouts as a kid.”

  They don’t really have a choice, since there is not enough space for the whole group in the old homestead. Meetings are outside, rain or shine, and each troop has its home base by one of the shelters. Getting kids outside to enjoy friluftsliv is one of the main goals of the Swedish Scout movement, not just for the sake of their personal health, but also to foster an understanding for nature and environmentally sustainable practices. But their idea of getting to know nature is more about survival skills than about bird-watching.

  “We get to know nature in order to utilize it. We build towers, we burn things,” Magnus says. “When we set up camp, our first priority is to make sure that the group can survive. Then we’ll worry about the recyclables and make sure that we do as little damage as possible.”

  One element stands out as particularly important: fire. “If we don’t burn something at a meeting, everybody becomes disappointed, including the leaders,” Magnus jokes.

  Whoever said that kids should never play with fire obviously never saw Swedish Scouts in action. Today, they’re supposed to practice for a competition appropriately named “Hundred-Meter Fire.” In this game, the troops first make a fire, then move it a certain distance—for example, a hundred meters. Along the way, they have to make several stops and complete assignments, like burning off a piece of string, bringing a pot full of water to a boil, popping popcorn, and, finally, lighting a torch. The youngest kids are allowed to use matches, precut wood, and a metal grill for moving the fire. The oldest are only allowed to use a fire striker and have to collect wood from the forest and figure out their own way of moving the burning logs.

  As soon as they get the go-ahead from their leader, several of the children pull out their knives and start making kindling by cutting small wood shavings from logs. Others take to the woods to look for tinder. A girl who looks to be no older than ten years old starts chopping wood using an axe like nobody’s business. How to handle knives, axes, and fire are some of the first skills they learn when joining at age nine, and many Scandinavian parents believe that these practical basics—how to survive in the outdoors—are an important part of a well-rounded education.

  “The whole point of these exercises is to show them the usefulness of these skills,” says Torbjörn, a leader whose daughter joined the Scouts five years ago. “If they can’t get the fire started, they end up eating their hot dogs cold. That’s happened before.”

  Soon, several fires are burning around us, and the first troop to burn through the string begins to move their fire. Two girls lift it up using two long, straight branches that they have placed underneath the metal grille that holds the burning logs. For a few seconds, the fire rests precariously on the grille while the girls cautiously move forward with their load over the rocky ground. Then they lose their balance and the fire starts falling apart. Thump, thump. Thump. Burning logs hit the ground (which is moist and not at risk for catching fire) and sparks fly in all directions.

  This doesn’t seem to throw anybody off.

  “That’s okay, you can put it down right there,” says Jacob, one of the younger leaders, calmly and without a trace of sarcasm.

  Meanwhile, Nora is poking a stick into another fire, then pulling it out and pretending it is a torch. Instinctively, I feel like telling her to put it down and stop playing with the fire. Then I realize that if there ever was a place where this is considered acceptable, this is it, so I let it go. But she is not content with this. She wants to use a knife. I ask Magnus if he thinks it would be okay for her to borrow one. He cracks a big smile. This is a request he’s more than happy to heed.

  “Of course you want a knife,” he says, and pulls one up from his pocket. “Here you go.”

  It takes a couple of tries and a little bit of frustration, but eventually Nora is able to whittle away a few chips from a small pine branch. She works on it fastidiously until darkness falls and only reluctantly returns the knife when it is time for us to leave. As we walk home, a thick smell of wet pine and burning wood fills the air. The sound of children laughing and yelling eventually dissipates, but Nora keeps talking about her experience until she falls asleep that night, tired and happy, her hair reeking distinctly of campfire.

  I knew that Nora’s encounter with the Swedish Scouts had left a lasting impression, and during a trip to Copenhagen a few weeks later I become even more convinced that the Scandinavian approach to risky play and freedom with responsibility is essential for children.

  The first thing that stands out to me when I arrive at the central train station in Copenhagen is the sight of dozens of preschool children in high-visibility vests walking through the main hall with their teachers. They’re walking in pairs, holding hands, nonchalantly chatting and seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are navigating one of the biggest transportation hubs in Scandinavia. Then again, they have been groomed for this since the day they started walking.

  The second thing that strikes me, once I walk outside, are the bikes. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of bikes stacked in two stories in designated bike-parking areas similar to the outdoor parking lots for cars that I had seen in New York. The streets, too, are packed with bikes. I’m thankful that I’m not driving but instead riding shotgun with Danish native and filmmaker Daniel Stilling through the city. Daniel and his American wife, Aimie, are the creators of the award-winning documentary NaturePlay, which takes on the high-stakes testing that has come to define early childhood education in the US, and instead advocates for the Scandinavian tradition of letting preschoolers spend their days playing in nature.

  At a little less than twice the size of Massachusetts, Denmark has ten thousand cycle routes, and many of the bike riders are children. Some of them are on their way home from school; others are heading to their skolefritidsordning, or SFO, an after-school program for children of working parents (the Danish equivalent of Maya’s fritids). We’re heading to Regnbuen, “Rainbow,” an SFO where kids come to play with fire, hammers, and nails. And rabbits. Although usually not all at once.

  While Daniel, who is darkish-blond and has a neatly trimmed goatee, effortlessly navigates through the narrow, busy streetscape, Aimie tells me that the two of them met on a movie set where Daniel was filming and Aimie, a former backcountry rescue ranger with expertise in wilderness medicine, was in charge of safety. The first time Aimie visited Daniel’s native country, she got a crash course in the Scandinavian way of raising children. Daniel recalls how, when they went to a museum in the city of Roskilde, they saw a toddler climbing all over some low boulders in front of the museum.

  “The parents were not concerned at all, but Aimie was horrified,” Daniel says.

  “I was like, ‘Where’s the rubber surfacing?’” Aimie chimes in and laughs.

  After the couple had a daughter of their own, Bella, Aimie became a self-proclaimed helicopter parent who watched her daughter’s every step. That all changed after the couple decided to leave their home in Florida for an extended stay in Denmark, where they enrolled Bella in a forest kindergarten for a few months. Now Aimie says her helicopter tendencies are almost gone—she jokes that she’s “recovering, with bouts of regression.” The experience also led to the filming of NaturePlay, some of it right here at Rainbow.

  Established in 1984, Rainbow today has 150 children ages nine to sixteen years, who come here after, and sometimes before, school on a regular basis, on foot or by bike. Although an SFO is only open to the children who are enrolled there, Rainbow is modeled on the concept of public adventure playgrounds—or “junk playgrounds,” as they were initially called—which originated in Denmark. The first adventure playground was built in Emdrup in 1943, in the midst of the German occupation of Denmark during World War II. The prominent landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen is usually credited with having come up with the idea after noticing that children liked playing with leftover building materials at construction sites. From Denmark, the idea spread to several countries, and today there are more than one tho
usand such playgrounds in Europe.

  Bella Stilling walks through the construction zone at Rainbow, an after-school program in Copenhagen, Denmark, that is modeled on so-called junk playgrounds.

  Linda McGurk

  Never mind the fact that we’re in the middle of Copenhagen and flanked by a school on one side and a row of high-rises on the other—as we get out of the car we’re immediately greeted by a couple of geese and a free-range potbellied pig who are patrolling the place like they own it. A brown-and-white Danish country goat that is tied to a tree stump and sweeping the ground for edibles looks up at us when we walk by with Klaus Nedergaard, the SFO’s manager of thirty years. He introduces us to all the animals one by one, including two horses and two smaller ponies in a small enclosure. At first he strikes me as reserved, but then I realize that he is just the kind of person who doesn’t engage in trivial small talk. When he speaks, he is direct and to the point, each word carefully weighed and measured.

  “The brown pony bites,” Klaus tersely informs us.

  “Don’t touch it, honey!” Aimie quickly implores Bella; then she immediately corrects herself. “Helicopter parent, step back!” she says to herself, and laughs. “Some habits die hard.”

  “She’ll learn,” Klaus responds calmly.