How to be a Norwegian parent: let your kids roam free
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Total survivorship bias, however, as plenty of bad things happened to my fellow kids that I was lucky enough to escape. And even though I made it through, it doesn't mean I don't have at least one story where I was chased around a big empty field by another kid wielding a rusty machete.
And it's not all pickled herring and aquavit in Norway, as well. A story like this would surprise a lot of people, even in the US:
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/mar/20/norway-t...
USA here, now raising my own spawn.
Personally cannot grok the change in what today, I would let them do on their own - against what I was doing on my own, at the same or younger age, out of necessity in the 80s.
Our youngest has walked to the bus every morning since starting school at age 7. Granted, it's only a 800 meter walk, but still it's a good 10-15 minutes when your legs are short :)
After school, we might get a text message saying "i'm over at xxx's house", or we might not, but alarms usually don't start going off until 1-2 hours after expected arrival, at which point we may call the "usual suspects" to inquire if our child is there, and since pretty much everybody else around here does the same, there's no "shaming", as they might be the ones calling tomorrow :)
Being able to actually track the kids down was a major factor in them getting a phone. Our oldest didn't get a phone until he was 12, and obviously we didn't get texts from him, so it was the "if he's not home in 2 hours, we'll start calling around". These days, with the youngest, we can mostly just look at the "Find" app and see where he is. As for the oldest, he has turned off location tracking, but happily shares his location on Snapchat, so same same but different :D
It is a bit more strict than when i was a kid, but not far from it. When i grew up, i had a key for the house, and i could let my self in after school, or go out again, with the expectation that i would leave a note on the kitchen table with my approximate whereabouts. My parents both worked, and wouldn't be home until around dinner. It was the same for everybody else, so we just organized our own "play dates", and probably also got into more trouble that we would have if adults had been around, but hey, everybody made it out alive, and i believe we're stronger for it.
But well-to-do, vs. farm work & domestic chores.
EDIT: And also quite similar to my own mid-20th-century suburban American childhood. Which certainly was not well-to-do...but there weren't hours of daily chores for us kids.
This is my experience of my new country, and is part of the reason I enjoy living here and not in the Old Country.
(and I never travelled across the country; at most an hour or two away. But the fact remains: you all had a country like this, so it should be perfectly possible to implement afresh)
I've heard that kids in sweden are required to have a knife on school trips. How else are you going to get your sausage onto the stick to cook it over the fire?
An 11-year-old boy has died and his sister has been injured after a car he was driving crashed in Western Australia's Great Southern.
The boy was driving the car on a farming property near Frankland River, 400 kilometres south-east of Perth yesterday morning.
He and his nine-year-old sister were travelling down their driveway to meet a school bus when the car overturned and hit a tree.
In junior high school if we missed the school bus or didn't feel like taking it we'd often ride a 150 cc dirt bike off road for ~40 km (25 mile) instead (late 1970s).
Oh, and marine butterfly knives were a prized carry - with plastic handles and trapped air tubes for one handed use and buoyancy when fishing.
You all do share a time zone with the balisong capital of the world, after all.
I imagine a butterfly knife would also be incredibly low-maintenance compared to a keris; I always kind of imagined that one day you might forget to treat the latter in the manner to which it has become accustomed, and find yourself running amuk...
Similar practices exist in many cultures. If they're trying to influence Britain, then comparing to Norway is probably far more effective than some more-distant culture.
I'm vaguely aware of stories about young children in huge Japanese (& maybe Chinese) cities having similar independence, and of the "Old Enough!" Japanese reality show...but perhaps other HNer's could speak to that.
(in fact, IMX from last century's US, rich people there are more paranoid than poor about their offspring's ability to function as independent members of their society)
High-trust societies pay off in ways that don't tend to show up if one's only measure is GDP.
If Tories had been half as serious about "levelling up" as they'd claimed, we'd also see a lot less poverty in 2024 UK than there was in 2010.
(and norway ranks below ireland and luxemburg for GDP/capita)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index...
* recall: Brexit was sold on the premise that the UK would get even richer outside the EU.
I think this is where we're arguing at cross purposes.
I don't see heaps of disposable income having much to do with free range parenting: it's cheaper, after all, to let your kids organise their own activities than to be endlessly shuttling them between formal paid activities.
That said, the flip side of it being cheaper is that you can't just go out and buy a high-trust country even if you want to and have disposable income; you have to give everyone the experience that it's much nicer to live someplace where things don't just sprout legs and walk away if you leave them unattended.
Those experiences don't cost anything, but getting there takes work, and while I think the US and UK would be willing to spend a lot of legal tender to "fix social issues", neither polity seems willing to get there by paying their dues instead.
Maybe not directly. But indirectly it has a huge effect on the overall well-being of your society and thus the things you can or can't do. Or do you believe that Norwegians would still behave the same way if they had income inequality similar to less fortunate countries? Because I don't see any evidence for that.
(that is: if you set out to make a society where "free range" parenting works, you will naturally also reduce income inequality; if you set out to make a society where middle class workers have to be kept motivated by fear of falling into a –reputedly or truly— crime-ridden underclass, you probably won't wind up with one suitable for what I would consider normal parenting)
That is an extremely bold assumption that has zero evidence. In fact, if you look at income inequality around the world, you'll see other factors are infinitely more important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Not even accounting for Berkson's paradox yet (patience pls!), let's set Japan's gini as fiducial for free range parenting countries?
Possible outliers: south Korea, hk (see also my comment below while initiating consideration of Berkson)
Interesting datapoints: Ukraine, Iraq, pakistan
To get an idea of the level of discourse we should be aiming for, how about we investigate those interesting datapoints to find out if we should consider median (non-extensive) PPP as a proxy for parenting free-rangedness♥
Let's revisit this conversation in 20 years' time when Pakistan has leapfrogged India. Keeping my fingers crossed for Ukraine
Don't feel sorry, that's arrogance too :)
More productively, how do you think your hypotheses differs from mine? All I'm saying here is, the question of how to find data in the world to answer the question of whether reducing inequality improves trust in society deserves attention and interest.
Don't just stop at the null hypothesis? Cynicism means, waiting for data to reveal itself, even in absence of any nonnullhypothesis. Quite (median) physicist, to be fair?
You also don't have to assume the null hypothesis that I am not like you :)
Tbh this seems like a huge waste of time for any conversation, so you'll have to excuse me if I disengage here.
Sorry but you read an article in "The Guardian" about how to parent like one of the wealthiest and privileged nations in Europe and you take this as "general advice". THAT is laughable and stupid.
Most of the stuff in this article that is touted as this utopian freedom for kids is what I strongly associate with poverty around the world.
Taking yourself to and back from school? Taking care of yourself because there is nobody else to do it? Spending time outside because you don't want to stay home? Sounds more like every "black teenager in the projects" story I've ever seen on TV.
Sure, it sucks harder for poor people. So rich people shouldn't give their kids the chance to grow up as real people and learn independence? If you can afford a golden cage, lock your kids up? I don't understand that reasoning.