The Kids Are Alright, or Børnene har det godt
This morning is School Photo Day for my kids and they’re up early taking far more care of their appearance than they normally would. Hair has been carefully styled. The 11-year old has chosen a hawaiian-style shirt more suited to a beach than a rainy September morning in Jutland. They’ve been looking forward to this morning since January: every student at the school gets an individual mug shot with their name underneath in the annual school “Who’s who” book and there’s a class group picture. Now, my kids will officially belong.
They get their bikes out and I wave them off. The 13-year old has to be extra early this morning as he’s on Crossing Duty – part of his Service as Action, which is a requirement of the International Baccalaureate Middle Years programme. He will get to wear a high-visibility jacket and brandish a “Stop” sign at traffic and he’s immeasurably proud.
Mornings like this remind me of the journey my two sons have been on over the past eight months. In the run up to moving here, a lot of people told me I was “very brave”. This was actually a euphemism used in the UK in the 80s and 90s for being gay, so I guess I am brave in that sense at least. I don’t remember anyone saying the same to my sons before we moved, and actually I think they are far more brave. It’s always difficult to emigrate with children but harder still to uproot young adults with their own views and burgeoning independent lives from their home that they’ve always lived in and take them to a completely new country. It’s especially guilt-inducing when one of your children is autistic and you know you have deliberately brought a huge change and added uncertainty into their life, for a while at least. How the children will settle is probably the principal worry of any parent relocating from their home country.
And for a while, emotions were very high. My sons are similar to Eeyore and Tigger from “Winnie the Pooh”: the Eeyore-like 13-year old operates on the assumption that everything is and will be terrible, until proven otherwise. The younger, Tigger-like 11-year old is chirpy and positive, until something takes his bounce away. For the first few months, everything was just further proof to the older one that Denmark was rubbish. The younger one loved being treated like a major celebrity by his class as the new international kid, then when that interest naturally waned, he abruptly lost his bounce. As a parent, nothing quite makes you feel guilty like a hissed “Well, we were dragged here,” from the older one, or a tearful “I hate it here. I want to go home,” from the younger one, when you know you technically did drag them here and going home is impossible. Kids know very well how to press all these buttons in you too. There were a lot of tears and a lot of guilt. For a while, I wondered if things would ever get any better.
Then gradually and suddenly, they did get better. Both boys made friends. We bought a house and they could easily walk to meet their new friends. There were fewer tears and less shouting. Earlier in the summer, the older one told me out of the blue that he’d be sad to go back to Scotland now and that he never wanted to go back to his old school, and then I was the one in tears.
What has helped my wife and I while riding the rollercoaster of emotions – more up and down than anything LEGOLAND can offer – is the certainty that our boys are growing up in a better place than the UK currently is. No country is perfect but when I think of the changes I’ve seen in both of them since we arrived in January, it’s huge. Their school experience is central to this. The first time I visited it, I felt myself welling up with emotion. I had worked in secondary school education for twenty years in the UK but I had never seen a school like this. The emphasis on kindness, creativity and free thinking was evident everywhere. When my mother-in-law, also a teacher, visited, she had exactly the same reaction, and she won’t mind me saying she’s more of a practical than overly emotional person! It’s just very powerful to see. In the UK we try to emulate Denmark’s child-centred approach, based on inspirational learning and rooted in young people’s own interests. Unfortunately, in the UK such an approach fails because everyone knows what really matters to the system, no matter what research says, is traditional academic learning and exam grades. The 13-year old never flourished within this system; he just came home from school frustrated and feeling stupid. Yesterday I got an email from his homeroom teacher telling me how well he was doing and what a difference she had seen in his confidence speaking and presenting to groups. I’ve noticed that since starting school in Denmark, the 13-year old walks a bit taller (and not only because he’s grown so much since we arrived). He makes eye contact with new people when he speaks. He comes home from school smiling and keen to talk about what he’s learned because he actually enjoys it. Within an environment that actively encourages the expression of opinions rather than quiet conformity, it turns out that the 13-year old, who is one of life’s natural challengers, has a lot to say. There is no escape from public speaking in Danish education (in the UK this would be the preserve of expensive private schools) and he is learning to embrace it. No wonder he doesn’t want to go back to his old school.
The 11-year old has flourished too. For him, one of the best things about school in Denmark is the absence of school uniform. Every day he goes to school looking like a children’s TV presenter in a collection of brightly coloured clothes rather than dull navy blue and grey. The 11-year old is very much an Indoor Child but he can finally ride a bike, a feat which took so long to achieve that at one point I thought even if his heroine Taylor Swift offered him private cycling lessons, he would refuse. He was so proud of himself when he learned that he asked if we could celebrate with champagne. Clearly, he’s prematurely adopted a very Danish attitude to alcohol! He has found a wonderful group of friends too, as diverse in interests and nationality as they are loyal to each other. And while the IB curriculum has supported his older brother, it has challenged the 11-year old, who naturally likes maximum praise for minimum effort, in new ways. He arrived two thirds of the way through an interdisciplinary project and found himself having to research, write up and present an exhibition on art to the entire school, aged from 3 to 16, with only three weeks to prepare. And he did it. No scores or grades came at the end of it, the way the UK marks all learning classed as worthwhile, but the confidence and skills he developed will be far more valuable to him in the rest of his life than getting full marks on a Maths test. I have literally never seen him work so hard!
I’ve never been the kind of parent to boast about my children’s achievements but actually I think on this occasion it’s ok to. They’re doing alright. More than alright. And we have moving to Denmark to thank for that.
