More chores plus more risks equals happy kids
CONSIDERING 2016 was the year Brits embraced the cosy Danish concept of hygge, then 2017 may be the year in which we tire of candles and adopt the rougher and readier Dutch version: gezelligheid.
For while hygge has been hijacked to flog cashmere blankets and luxury log burners,
gezelligheid, according to Michele Hutchison, a British writer who moved to the Netherlands in 2004, is simply ‘a biscuit tin on a table and a mug of coffee. It’s hot chocolate or pea soup and the sound of lively chatter with anoraks drying in the hall’.
She also thinks it’s the key to explaining why a 2013 Unicef study found that Dutch children are ‘ the happiest in the world’. British kids came a lowly 16th.
In this entertaining new book, co-written with another expat mum, Rina Mae Acosta, Hutchison says that: ‘The Netherlands has a reputation for being a liberal country with a tolerance of sex, drugs and alcohol, yet beneath this lies a closely guarded secret: the Dutch are actually fairly conservative people. At the heart of Dutch culture is a society of home-loving people who place the child firmly at the centre.
‘Parents have a healthy attitude towards their kids, seeing them as individuals rather than as extensions of themselves. They understand that achievement doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness, but that happiness can cultivate achievement.’
The duo’s book on the joys of going Dutch will be a relief to any parents who felt shamed by Pamela Druckerman’s 2012 paean to formal Gallic childrearing, French Children Don’t Throw Food. There’s a very funny passage in which the authors cringe at the noisy, sprawling games their kids enjoy on a French beach while the local children all sit quietly on their towels. But they also pity those perfect French children raised as ‘mini adults’, who miss out on delights and empowering life lessons learned through free-range play.
I’m always taking my young children through the woods at dusk and across beaches in the snow. But this summer I was aggressively reprimanded by a local man for swimming with them in a river at a spot recommended by the UK’s Wild Swimming Society. He told me they were likely to die of Weil’s disease. I knew they stood more chance of being killed in a car accident.
In Holland, kids swim and play outdoors unsupervised all the time. They are expected to make realistic risk assessments, and become hardy and independent; to get muddy, then do their own laundry.
Lured to the Low Countries by their Dutch husbands, both authors admit that at first they struggled with the blunt earthiness of the culture and grey, wet weather. But then they discovered their own stress levels dropping in a society which expects them to speak their
THE HAPPIEST KIDS IN THE WORLD by Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison (Doubleday £14.99)
minds and bicycle everywhere in all weathers. No surprise this is also a recipe for relaxed, healthy kids.
Much of this is common sense. We all know pushing kids too hard and suppressing individuality creates anxiety. Acosta herself knows this from personal experience. Born and bred in San Francisco, the child of self-sacrificing Filipino parents who worked 24/7 to give her an excellent education, she feels her childhood was ‘more endured than enjoyed’.
Her friends back in the U.S. report that things are even worse these days as pre-schoolers battling for places at the ‘right’ nurseries are asked: ‘So, what have you done with the first 36 months of your life?’
Things are not quite so bad in the UK but we also are guilty of piling on the pressure.
Academic education doesn’t begin in Dutch schools until after kids turn six. Dutch kids are never pushed to be the best, they are constantly reassured that ‘ a six out of ten is good enough’. Despite this apparent lack of aspiration, and the chocolate sprinkles that Dutch kids all eat for breakfast, Netherlanders do very well in the world. Holland boasts 21 Nobel Prize winners and Dutch inventors haven given the world the CD, the DVD, Bluetooth and wi-fi.
Although the book was written before either author’s children hit puberty, both women are looking forward to relatively stress- free teenage years.
The relaxed, but fully informed attitudes to sex, drugs and alcohol in Holland yields remarkably welladjusted young people. Their low rates of teen pregnancy, drug abuse and binge drinking put us to shame.
I would say all parents should read this book. But perhaps that’s just piling on unnecessary, Brit-style pressure. Maybe you should just go out for a bike ride with your kids in the rain then open the biscuits. Gezellig!