After the birth of my first daughter in 2006, Denmark kept cropping up. I read Oliver James's Affluenza, in which he declared the Danes the "happiest people in the world". Shortly afterwards, a Unicef report ranked Danish children's wellbeing third (just behind the Netherlands and Sweden) among industrialised countries. British children came 21st – bottom.
There were newspaper stories about Denmark's forest school nurseries, a supportive state that heavily subsidises childcare, and an education system that encourages children to be children and in which teachers are more concerned with pupils' social development and happiness than the school's advancement up a league table. It sounded like a family-friendly nirvana. So I decided to find out for myself and ended up swapping lives with Nina Kragh, a journalist from the Danish newspaper Politiken.
The differences in the way we live were immediately clear. Nina lives in a three-storey townhouse in the city centre, and when we arrive there are children of all ages playing unsupervised in the street, which is flanked by sandpits, a wooden playhouse and picnic tables. Here children take priority over cars.
In Denmark, childcare is heavily subsidized. Full-time nursery costs on average £300 a month. That's what I pay a week. Nannies are rare; most kids attend state-run nurseries from six months to six years, when official schooling begins.
For more: Is it better to bring up kids in Denmark? | Life and style | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment