How to be a Norwegian parent: let your kids roam free

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jul/11/how-to-be-a-norwegian-parent-let-your-kids-roam-free-stay-home-alone-have-fun-and-fail

by PotatoNinja • 2 years ago

16 36 2 years ago

theguardian.com

bell-cot3• 2 years ago

Sounds very much like the century-ago rural America that my parents grew up in.

But well-to-do, vs. farm work & domestic chores.

EDIT: And also quite similar to my own mid-20th-century suburban American childhood. Which certainly was not well-to-do...but there weren't hours of daily chores for us kids.

sigmoid1011• 2 years ago

This stuff usually just feels like a rich people flex. "Yeah, we don't worry about this stuff you seem to worry about. But we also live in an ecologically pristine place with ultra-high living standards and extremely low crime rates and a very manageable population density." - Good for you. But not everyone can be born there or afford to live there. So taking any of this as general advice is somewhere between laughable and stupid.

bell-cot3• 2 years ago

That seems to be the Guardian-standard PoV - the 1%, but not the 0.01%.

Similar practices exist in many cultures. If they're trying to influence Britain, then comparing to Norway is probably far more effective than some more-distant culture.

sigmoid1011• 2 years ago

Norway's population density is an order of magnitude lower than the UK's. If all Norwegians lived in London (and they could - their entire population would fit inside the city limits, not even using the metro area) they would probably behave differently as well.

0823498723498729• 2 years ago

It's not a rich people flex when the whole country is doing it.

(in fact, IMX from last century's US, rich people there are more paranoid than poor about their offspring's ability to function as independent members of their society)

High-trust societies pay off in ways that don't tend to show up if one's only measure is GDP.

sigmoid1011• 2 years ago

Norway is special because the entire country is rich. Their poverty rate is two orders of magnitude lower than e.g. the UK's. Things only get complicated when you start to mix rich and poor people - as is the case in most places in the world.

r0ckarong• 2 years ago

So taking any of this as general advice is somewhere between laughable and stupid.

Sorry but you read an article in "The Guardian" about how to parent like one of the wealthiest and privileged nations in Europe and you take this as "general advice". THAT is laughable and stupid.

Most of the stuff in this article that is touted as this utopian freedom for kids is what I strongly associate with poverty around the world.

Taking yourself to and back from school? Taking care of yourself because there is nobody else to do it? Spending time outside because you don't want to stay home? Sounds more like every "black teenager in the projects" story I've ever seen on TV.

Sure, it sucks harder for poor people. So rich people shouldn't give their kids the chance to grow up as real people and learn independence? If you can afford a golden cage, lock your kids up? I don't understand that reasoning.

sigmoid1011• 2 years ago

It's not about locking your kids up, it's about not doing stupid shit. And what can be considered stupid vastly changes depending on where you live in the world. Curiously, as you apparently have discovered, if everyone is poor, then some aspects of children's lifes are very similar to when everyone is rich. A homogenous society works pretty well in that regard. But when you start mixing rich and poor people, you are asking for trouble. So if you need a real takeaway from all this, it should be that we need to stop the wealth gap from spreading. Not treating your kids like super rich or super poor societies do.

beej71• 2 years ago

I grew up in the US in the 70s and we didn't have any of that. Parents had me walking to school at 5. Something else has changed.

thatoneguy• 2 years ago

This reads a lot like my childhood of the '80s and early '90s in the US with zero supervision due to having a single mom.

Total survivorship bias, however, as plenty of bad things happened to my fellow kids that I was lucky enough to escape. And even though I made it through, it doesn't mean I don't have at least one story where I was chased around a big empty field by another kid wielding a rusty machete.

And it's not all pickled herring and aquavit in Norway, as well. A story like this would surprise a lot of people, even in the US:

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/mar/20/norway-t...

jprd• 2 years ago

This is eerie to me, I could have made the exact same post, but with s/machete/chain.

USA here, now raising my own spawn.

Personally cannot grok the change in what today, I would let them do on their own - against what I was doing on my own, at the same or younger age, out of necessity in the 80s.

8fingerlouie• 2 years ago

It's pretty much the same in Denmark, at least if you live in a small town.

Our youngest has walked to the bus every morning since starting school at age 7. Granted, it's only a 800 meter walk, but still it's a good 10-15 minutes when your legs are short :)

After school, we might get a text message saying "i'm over at xxx's house", or we might not, but alarms usually don't start going off until 1-2 hours after expected arrival, at which point we may call the "usual suspects" to inquire if our child is there, and since pretty much everybody else around here does the same, there's no "shaming", as they might be the ones calling tomorrow :)

Being able to actually track the kids down was a major factor in them getting a phone. Our oldest didn't get a phone until he was 12, and obviously we didn't get texts from him, so it was the "if he's not home in 2 hours, we'll start calling around". These days, with the youngest, we can mostly just look at the "Find" app and see where he is. As for the oldest, he has turned off location tracking, but happily shares his location on Snapchat, so same same but different :D

It is a bit more strict than when i was a kid, but not far from it. When i grew up, i had a key for the house, and i could let my self in after school, or go out again, with the expectation that i would leave a note on the kitchen table with my approximate whereabouts. My parents both worked, and wouldn't be home until around dinner. It was the same for everybody else, so we just organized our own "play dates", and probably also got into more trouble that we would have if adults had been around, but hey, everybody made it out alive, and i believe we're stronger for it.

0823498723498729• 2 years ago

This* was my (dual parent) childhood in the US, but maybe that was only last century?

This is my experience of my new country, and is part of the reason I enjoy living here and not in the Old Country.

(and I never travelled across the country; at most an hour or two away. But the fact remains: you all had a country like this, so it should be perfectly possible to implement afresh)

0823498723498729• 2 years ago

I’m not so sure about my future five-year-old returning home to tell me he’d been working on his stick whittling and knife skills at his London nursery

I've heard that kids in sweden are required to have a knife on school trips. How else are you going to get your sausage onto the stick to cook it over the fire?

defrost• 2 years ago

Story from my state (2013)

    An 11-year-old boy has died and his sister has been injured after a car he was driving crashed in Western Australia's Great Southern.

    The boy was driving the car on a farming property near Frankland River, 400 kilometres south-east of Perth yesterday morning.

    He and his nine-year-old sister were travelling down their driveway to meet a school bus when the car overturned and hit a tree.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-24/young-boy-killed-whil...

In junior high school if we missed the school bus or didn't feel like taking it we'd often ride a 150 cc dirt bike off road for ~40 km (25 mile) instead (late 1970s).

Oh, and marine butterfly knives were a prized carry - with plastic handles and trapped air tubes for one handed use and buoyancy when fishing.

0823498723498729• 2 years ago

marine butterfly knives

You all do share a time zone with the balisong capital of the world, after all.

I imagine a butterfly knife would also be incredibly low-maintenance compared to a keris; I always kind of imagined that one day you might forget to treat the latter in the manner to which it has become accustomed, and find yourself running amuk...

How to be a Norwegian parent: let your kids roam free

Related Stories