When Becca and Jordan Itkowitz returned to La Grange, Illinois, after three years in Denmark with their two sons, Evan, 8, and Max, 10, they experienced culture shock.
Shortly after moving to the state in 2017, Becca received a call from the school that Max had thrown a snowball during recess.
“Not for anyone, mind you,” Becca told The Post. “I just throw a snowball because it’s fun and he’s a kid. I laughed and agreed to talk to him about American school rules and how snow can be perceived as a ‘weapon’.”
Max was also punished for taking a stick. “In Denmark, picking up sticks was always to build a fort or just to play,” she said.
This was in stark contrast to what they had experienced in Denmark, where children in kindergarten are given – by American standards – great latitude.
“They get to play in the rain, cook over fires, and are able to take safe, age-appropriate risks,” Becca explained.
Danes can teach us a lot about raising children, according to British journalist Helen Russell, especially since the country has been consistently voted one of the happiest in the world since the 1970s.
Currently living in Denmark with her husband and three children, she explored the unique parenting styles of the neighboring Nordic countries – a far cry from American tiger moms and helicopter parents – in her book The Danish Secret to Happy Kids.
For starters, there’s “less pressure on academics,” Russell told The Post.
“You don’t start school until you’re 6 (in Denmark, 7 in Finland),” she explained, adding that there’s a big emphasis on “playing”.
“The game is so appreciated,” she said. “Now, there’s so much research showing how important it is, how learning through play is still so valuable. And in the Nordic countries, it’s kind of celebrated.”
Even the school experience is significantly different from the US education system.
“There is no homework until the age of 11,” she said. “Usually there are no tests until much later,” around age 16.
Russell said bad weather is no excuse to stay indoors, saying there’s an old adage: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.”
“The more I read books to my kids from the US or the UK, they’re all, like, ‘And the kids couldn’t go out to play because it was raining.’ And that just doesn’t happen here,” she said. “You get kicked out no matter what.”
Along with improving mental health, Russell found that “time outside helps develop mastery.”
“You’re getting stronger, more confident, physically stronger,” Russell said. “We’ve read enough pieces of the lifestyle to see that we feel better about it, but somehow we’re not giving that to our kids in the US, in the UK.”
And all this outside play must be doing something right: Denmark consistently tops the World Happiness Report, which assesses the happiness of people from 130 countries and takes into account life expectancy, DGP and social support.
Russell also noted that Nordic children are not expected to make it through childhood without a few bruises and broken limbs.
“I regularly got my kids with some scratches,” she said, adding that they often came from some physical activity like climbing a tree.
However, she astutely pointed out that laissez-faire The position is a “massive privilege to have tax-funded health care so that a broken arm is not a medical bankruptcy. It’s just a broken arm.”
Russell said it’s not that Danish parents want their children to get hurt; instead there is an attitude that parents are harming their children “if we don’t let them have adventurous and dangerous play”.
“They think that giving kids these experiences and letting them stretch themselves, like being outside in all weathers, helps them develop a kind of confidence and be more resilient.”
Sean McEvoy, who lived in Denmark for seven years from 2017 to 2023 with his wife, Amy, and three sons, said they also noticed the changes immediately.
“Three-year-olds were like whistling sharp knives and, like, tending and starting fires,” he told The Post. “And then, you’d be, ‘Where did that 3-year-old go?'” and then you’d look up and they’d be like the highest branches of the tree, and the parents were either cooking their sausages or drinking a beer or just about around, but not, as it were, hovering over the little ones to make sure they didn’t like to come to some terrible mishap.”
McEvoy said he also realized there is a big difference in the way Danes approach education.
“We lived in New York City for a very long time, and the culture around school and education and academics was extremely hands-on,” he said. “What we found in Denmark, especially at younger ages, is that the Danish philosophy of education is that children have to learn to love learning before they’re ready to be tested on anything.”
He admitted it took some getting used to, as they would ask one of their sons what he had learned in school, “and he would reach into his pocket and pull out rocks and dead insects and say, ‘I found all these and we lit a fire'”.
Their worries grew when they would visit the state family and cousins their son’s age would read. However, McEvoy explained that “at six months, it was like a switch turned and suddenly he was reading and reading at a very high level”.
“I think their philosophy is, like, ‘Don’t do it until they’re ready, but build them up very gradually. Don’t burn them on the table early on, how to get them to a point where they’re willing to take truly more rigorous academics.’
“But don’t do it too soon or you’ll push them away and annoy them.”
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