Dårligt Forældreskab (Bad Parenting), Danish style
It doesn’t take much to make me feel like a bad parent. This morning on my way to yoga I cycled (see how I’m trying to position myself as virtuous here?) past a house beautifully and painstakingly decorated for Halloween. The Danish, I’ve discovered, are particularly good at this kind of seasonal celebration, accessorised with a level of enthusiastic crafting, baking and co-ordinated entertainment that I am frankly very poor at. We failed spectacularly at our first Danish Halloween. We didn’t decorate anything, beyond buying a pumpkin from some seniors at my sons’ school who were fundraising for a project, then dumping it on our front doorstep and doing absolutely nothing more with it. We did not carve the pumpkin to look like a Hans Christian Andersen character. Nobody dressed up. The 13-year old was going to go as Maverick from Top Gun for the second year running (after I verified this complied with the school stipulation of no military gear) but we couldn’t find the costume after moving house in the summer. Then the 13-year old decided he was too cool and grown up for Hallowe’en anyway and went to school in his usual black-and-grey outfit, which I suppose is Halloween adjacent – he could be mistaken for a bat or a modern-day, casually dressed wizard.
The 11-year old experienced his own, more visceral version of Halloween horror by having two teeth taken out at the dentist. They were loose baby teeth – don’t judge me! I’ve already been shamed by the Danish dentist for my apparently poor ability to supervise my children’s brushing habits and lack of concern about wobbly teeth taking ages to fall out. I tried and failed to explain that in the UK you’d be lucky to even see the dentist once a year and they definitely wouldn’t concern themselves with removing loose baby teeth, never mind issuing monthly appointments at Teeth Brushing School. This is an actual thing. My child is at the dentist so often at the moment, I feel like he has a part-time job there. So on Halloween there was real terror and blood for him and he was left temporarily unable to eat any Halloween slik, even if he’d felt like going out trick-or-treating, or guising as we call it in Scotland. We are not American in this house, even if the 11-year-old in particular sounds more and more like it each day!
It’s not just Halloween and the dentist: there are a whole string of reasons why I regularly feel like a Bad Parent, or dårligt forælder in Denmark despite the general hygge loveliness of living here. All parents feel the guilt sometimes, but it’s intensified by the huge, overarching fact that we uprooted both the kids from their home country, their extended family and their secure community with friends they’d had their whole lives, to bring them here. Ten months in, I can mostly shrug this off by pointing out all they’ve gained and learned since moving here – new friends, an incredible school, Legoland on their doorstep – but sometimes I still feel the nagging guilt. Added to that, there’s adapting to a different culture that values different skills and attributes, and becoming aware of all the things my kids can’t or don’t (yet) do, that are highly prized in Denmark. They can’t prepare meals for themselves, bake cakes or even make hot drinks for exhausted parents. They take on too little responsibility for household tasks and I’m too willing to let them get away with this, because we “dragged” them here, to quote the 13-year old. The 11-year old has only just learned to ride a bike after protracted frustration on his and our part and bribery. They’re not too fond of the outdoors. They can’t build a fire. They’re on screens too much…
It turns out, though, that Danish parents also struggle with this last one. It’s not just me! Recently I spoke to Dr Imran Rashid for a Last Week in Denmark article about the Danish government’s strategy to deal with increasing social concerns about screen time and young people. Our Nordic neighbours Sweden and Norway have taken a more authoritarian approach, with the former setting out recommended screen time at different ages and the latter planning to ban social media for under-15s. According to the Swedish government, my 11-year old should have no more than two hours of screen time per day, and the 13-year old no more than three. I’ll just be honest here: my kids have more than this (another reason to feel like a dårligt forælder) so it’s just as well we don’t live in Sweden. Here, the government’s approach, which Dr Rashid has helped to formulate, has taken the form of recommendations rather than diktats. He believes this is the right way forward, in keeping with the way Danish society emphasises individual responsibility, underpinned by values and principles, and empowering local government. I’m winning at some of the recommendations from Sundhedsstyrelsen, the Danish health agency: I take screens out of my kids’ bedrooms at night to ensure healthy sleep, I do talk to them about their screen use, wellbeing and being responsible, and I try to get them off the screens as much as possible. My wife, who is way better at being the family IT Helpdesk than me, has limits and parental settings on YouTube and so on for them. Having spent too many hours dealing with various issues caused by phones when I worked in schools in Scotland (“It wasn’t me that took a photo of the teacher and called her a bitch on Snapchat, honestly”, sigh) I’m also delighted to be living in a country where more and more schools are removing phones altogether during the school day. My kids hand over their mobiles at 8am, the wheeled trolley disappears into the school office and they don’t see the devices again until 2.30 pm when they go home, leaving them free to learn without constant vibrating distractions and actually socialise with their friends at break and lunch. Dr Rashid’s words on this really stuck with me: “The most important device kids bring to school is their brain”.
A side effect of no phones in school is that my kids are extra keen to get on a device as soon as they come home again. And where I find it hard is that screens allow them to keep in touch with friends back in Scotland during long hours in Minecraft realms (where, bizarrely, they spend a lot of time being digitally “outdoors”, building shelters, hunting, making open fires and preparing food for themselves – Minecraft is actually quite Danish!), texting and FaceTiming. Often, the two of them sit together in one of their bedrooms and play online with their Scottish friends as well – a touching bit of brotherly bonding that didn’t happen nearly as much back home. So what is the right balance between allowing them this time to sustain these friendships at physical remove, and forcing them into the Danish outdoors?
I feel like a dårligt forælder again when I read the recommendations for parents from the Danish health agency, which include limiting your own screen use and discussing how you use your device with your children. I know I spend too much time on my phone, exacerbated by a move to working remotely in Denmark that requires daily use of no less than six social media platforms, email and Zoom, plus the need to stay in touch with what’s happening in the news and in culture in general. All this means my screen time each day is well in excess of the Swedish recommended limit of three hours per day. Sometimes it’s been nearly three times that.
I’m making my shameful daily screen hours sound essential, but a chunk of this time is optional too. I imagine discussing with my kids what I’m doing during that optional time, as the Sundhedsstyrelsen recommends. “Right now, I’m watching a video from an Instagram account that documents the daily adventures of the owner’s cat as captured on a collar camera (@snowys_life0 if you’re interested – it’s surprisingly entertaining). I spent half an hour before that browsing items on Danish Vinted that I don’t need, and I don’t think I can justify this in the name of improving my language skills. Before that I mindlessly scrolled Instagram Stories and got annoyed with the same person who annoys me every day, who I met once at a concert. I could delete them but I think I actually like to have an outlet for my daily annoyance and right now they are it. It’s possible too that I am that person for someone else. Hmm.” It doesn’t really make great reading, and it makes me resolve to be a Bedre Forælder (Better Parent) when it comes to screen time. But at least, unlike the tooth brushing or the long list of other things, the Danes are striving here too. As parents, we’re all just doing the best we can.
