6 ms·

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

16 points by PotatoNinja 2y ago

emptyfile 2y ago
[dead]
bell-cot 2y 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sigmoid10 2y 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.
- beej71 2y 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.
- bell-cot 2y 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.
  - sigmoid10 2y 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.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      History is quite clear about immigrant neighborhoods in large cities retaining many of the social practices of their homelands. I'm vaguely aware of stories about young children in huge Japanese (& maybe Chinese) cities having similar independence, and of the "Old Enough!" Japanese reality show...but perhaps other HNer's could speak to that.
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        I know a couple of local families where the parents went to the US for school or work but came back when they wanted to start a family because doing so someplace where kids aren't expected to independently get around at 6 seemed suboptimal.
    - piva00 2y ago
      Dutch population density is double than the UK's, kids there grow up more similarly to Norwegian ones than British ones.
- 082349872349872 2y 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.
  - sigmoid10 2y 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.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      Their poverty rate (as with the UK's current one) is a choice. If Tories had been half as serious about "levelling up" as they'd claimed, we'd also see a lot less poverty in 2024 UK than there was in 2010.
      - sigmoid10 2y ago
        Only if you have a choice in where you are born. Almost a quarter of Norway's GDP stems from the sale of oil and gas. In the UK it's like 1-2%. Because of these sales, Norway owns the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. The UK couldn't have something like that even if they wanted to.
        082349872349872 2y ago
        The UK is a rich* country, that once had an empire; London is still a financial capital. (and norway ranks below ireland and luxemburg for GDP/capita) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index#GFCI_34_(September_2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index... * recall: Brexit was sold on the premise that the UK would get even richer outside the EU.
- r0ckarong 2y 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.
  - sigmoid10 2y 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.
thatoneguy 2y 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-town-forgave-child-killers https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/mar/20/norway-t...
- jprd 2y 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 2y 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
082349872349872 2y 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)
082349872349872 2y 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 2y 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-while-driving-car-after-it-overturned/4839854 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.
  - 082349872349872 2y 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...

16 points by PotatoNinja 2y ago

[dead]

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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sigmoid10 2y 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.

beej71 2y 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.
bell-cot 2y 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.
- sigmoid10 2y 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.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    History is quite clear about immigrant neighborhoods in large cities retaining many of the social practices of their homelands. I'm vaguely aware of stories about young children in huge Japanese (& maybe Chinese) cities having similar independence, and of the "Old Enough!" Japanese reality show...but perhaps other HNer's could speak to that.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      I know a couple of local families where the parents went to the US for school or work but came back when they wanted to start a family because doing so someplace where kids aren't expected to independently get around at 6 seemed suboptimal.
  - piva00 2y ago
    Dutch population density is double than the UK's, kids there grow up more similarly to Norwegian ones than British ones.
082349872349872 2y 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.
- sigmoid10 2y 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.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Their poverty rate (as with the UK's current one) is a choice. If Tories had been half as serious about "levelling up" as they'd claimed, we'd also see a lot less poverty in 2024 UK than there was in 2010.
    - sigmoid10 2y ago
      Only if you have a choice in where you are born. Almost a quarter of Norway's GDP stems from the sale of oil and gas. In the UK it's like 1-2%. Because of these sales, Norway owns the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. The UK couldn't have something like that even if they wanted to.
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        The UK is a rich* country, that once had an empire; London is still a financial capital. (and norway ranks below ireland and luxemburg for GDP/capita) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index#GFCI_34_(September_2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index... * recall: Brexit was sold on the premise that the UK would get even richer outside the EU.
r0ckarong 2y 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.
- sigmoid10 2y 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.

thatoneguy 2y 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-town-forgave-child-killers https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/mar/20/norway-t...

jprd 2y 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 2y 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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

082349872349872 2y 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)

082349872349872 2y 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 2y 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-while-driving-car-after-it-overturned/4839854 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.
- 082349872349872 2y 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...