Norwegian Free Range Parenting, Letters
It's 1'30pm. Nila and Arion arrive home after finishing school for the day. They let themselves in, make some food, then sit down to do homework, or practise piano, or do the housework they've been asked to do. Their parents won't be home for a few hours yet. The children sometimes go out with friends to play in the street or wander the fields. The only real rule is no screen time unless everything else has been taken care of.
So far, so normal, perhaps except the sister and brother are just 10 and 8, and they've been living this kind of unsupervised mini-adult life for years.
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| Norway Edward Price (1800-1885) Photo Credit: Nottingham City Museums & Galleries [CC BY-NC] |
While not exactly repressive or restrictive, 80s British parenting didn't value autonomy in the same way. I certainly didn't get my own chef's knife for my eighth birthday, as Nila did a couple of years ago. She puts it to good use; she's solely responsible for cooking dinner for the family one night a week.
"I can't think of anyone who doesn't parent like this," says Nila's and Arion's dad, Giancarlo Napoli. He recalls one child in Nila's class who moved to another town a few years back. Rather than switch schools, this child now walks 20 minutes from his home to the train station, takes a 20-minute train journey, then has another 20-minute walk from the station to school.
"This kid does that twice a day, and no one bats an eyelid," he says. (On a related note, Norwegian children as young as seven have been known to make solo journeys from one end of Norway to the other to visit their divorced parents.)...
It's a way of life, deeply ingrained to the point that most Norwegians I've spoken to can't understand either the fascination with their method, or why anyone would do it differently...
Childcare is also widely available and highly affordable, meaning that going out to work is financially worthwhile. For example, kindergarten fees for 10 hours a day, five days a week, are capped at NOK 2,000 (£150) a month. In the UK, the average cost for under-two's in full-time childcare is £300 a week...
Trust is something that comes up when I talk to Giancarlo and Lena about their parenting, and how mutual respect is crucial. In the school holidays, for example, they're happy for Nila and Arion to be out all day as long as they know what time they'll return - and the children comply. Lena says this is how her mother and grandmother were raised, and fondly remembers going to school herself as a six-year-old with a front door key around her neck on a piece of string.
(Andy Welch, The Guardian. 2024)
Much to learn here from this European country that also has the world's 10th highest GDP, the world's largest wealth fund and one of the world's lowest crime rates. Add all this to high living standards, well-funded public services and being seventh on the World Happiness Report. And yes you would, most probably, pay more tax than if you lived in the UK!
Letters
Re Andy Welch's article on Norwegian Parenting such willingness to allow children freedom was a feature of British life for many of us born five decades ago or more. It was not particularly unusual being put on a bus at the age of five with a luggage label pinned to my coat for a five-hour journey to my grandparents' house.
When there, my grandmother, who ran a seaside boarding house, would take me down to the beach in the morning with sixpence for the Punch and Judy show, and the instruction given to be at the pier gate when both the clock hands were at the top of the clock. This was the era of the Moors murders, and child abduction was a public fear.
A couple of years later, my younger siblings and I were given free range of the Great Orme headland, with its cliffs and quarries and mineshafts, along with the warning that we should not go near the edges, a prohibition we respected until our late teens.
(Robert Hardy, Cambridge, The Guardian 2024)
Reading Andy Welch's article, I can't help wondering why things have changed so much in Britain. I was brought up in the 1960s in south London. I went to school on my own by bus at age seven. I knew most of the local shopkeepers and they knew me. On the downside, maybe, I was also regularly sent out to buy cigarettes for my parents at that age.
(Mandy Lane, Ulverston, Cumbria, The Guardian, 2024)
To continue with what has changed, in the summers of 1967 and 1968 (aged 11 and 12), at 11am, my parents sat me on the boundary of Scarborough cricket ground to watch England v Rest of the World (yes), with a sandwich and something to drink. At 6.30pm they picked me up. I still remember getting Garry Sober's, Lance Gibbs's and Wes Hall's autographs. A shame this trust in others seems to have been lost.
(Alan Walker, Torrelodones, Madrid, Spain, The Guardian,2024)
I was brought up on the small island of Stronsay in the Orkney isles, and had a childhood very similar to the one described here. I often thought it was just because the place was remote and rural - but perhaps the Norwegian roots of Orcadian culture contributed to the local attitudes towards children.
I have to contrast it to life in St Albans, Hertfordshire, where I live now. I left my then eight-year-old son in the local playground to get him a sandwich from a nearby coffee shop. I was away a maximum of fifteen minutes. When I came back there was a furious lady, shouting at me, accusing me of being an irresponsible parent, and that people like me "end up being on the front page because they left their kid alone to be kidnapped".
To gain even a little freedom for our children here in England necessitates leaving oneself open to blame and accusation from other parents.
(Mark Weber, St Albans, The Guardian, 2024)
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