The Happiest Countries Do Motherhood Completely Differently

0:07Welcome to Motherkind, it is me your host Zoe Blaski. We are proudly sponsored by Wild Nutrition women's supplements. Have you ever thought about how your experience of motherhood might be different if you raised your children in a different country? It's something I have thought about a lot. We are so shaped and formed by the politics and the culture and the structure that is around us. So I cannot wait for you to hear this fascinating episode today. Helen Russell is an author and speaker about her experience of when she raised her family in Denmark. So Helen tells us in this episode how wildly different her experience was, how it helped her, how it formed how she parents and what culturally we can learn from other environments so that we can make in the UK our experience a little bit easier.

0:59Now, if you ever thought, I wonder what the different experiences of mothers are around the world, then this is an episode that you are going to want to listen to. Remember to subscribe. It helps me and it helps you. Here's the episode.

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2:42I'm so excited to meet you and to chat about the cultural differences around the world, particularly in Denmark, and how that intersects with how we experience motherhood. It's lovely to be here. Thank you so much. Ah, you have said that Denmark gave you permission to live differently. And I'm wondering what you meant by that. Well, I feel as though growing up in this country as a child of Margaret Thatcher's Britain and that sort of aim high, work hard, go, go, go culture, I was just permanently sort of on that hamster wheel. And I think in the Nordic countries and Denmark, there is a much more relaxed approach.

3:24So you are sort of worthy just because you don't have to achieve anything to be worthy. Everyone has has worth because they exist. and that for me was a bit of a game changer the idea that you would be of value and worth something without having had to achieve it was really very different and so I think even that really basic thing made me feel more comfortable and more sort of grounded yeah and I don't think it's basic at all it's kind of revolutionary isn't it yeah yeah I think you can see how in the UK or certainly the sort of fast paced hustle culture western countries how odds that is with that experience of matrescence and early motherhood yes where you were actually achieving so much but if you're not in paid work or if you've dropped down paid work or if you're changing your paid work a lot of it's invisible did it feel more visible your mothering experience i think i mean yeah you're physically creating human i think um it's more accepted that you will take parental leave early in denmark i I was freelance, so I didn't quite have all of the benefits of working Danes there.

4:28And it's more accepted that you will sort of fall apart for a little while and rebuild a bit differently. And you'll take a decent amount of parental leave. I remember speaking to American friends and they were asking about, you know, nursing and breastfeeding. And they said, oh, do they have breastfeeding rooms in Danish workplaces? And I said, well, no, because you don't need them because no one goes back until their children are maybe 10 months old. And then pretty much everyone goes back between 10 months and a year. and then it is accepted that they will go into the Vugustu, which is the nursery there, and you will move into the next phase.

5:01So there's less guilt because everybody is doing the same thing. It's all accepted that it's okay. There's none of the thoughts around attachment theory that we get here that make mothers sometimes feel terrible about their decisions either way. And so it was just much more normal. So yeah, more relaxed, I think. And yeah, it's the happiest country in the world. So they're obviously doing something right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think the trust in the system and the trust is 79 % of Danes trust most people, which I found extraordinary. So you're not worried all the time. You can let babies sleep outside in their prams.

5:33You trust no one is going to steal them. As my Danish neighbor said, it's too much like hard work. Why would anyone steal a baby? And yeah, and I was coming from the outside. I was quite anxious about that. But then I did it one time and it was fine. And then And spoiler, I had twins. So actually getting a double stroller in anywhere is a nightmare. So you have to leave them outside and rely on the kindness of strangers or seeing a twitching blanket and then knowing that you have to go out and retrieve your baby from the snow. So, yeah, it sort of took apart everything I knew and then I rebuilt it in a different way there, I guess.

6:08And what do you wish, having had that quite unique experience, what do you wish when you came back to the UK and you saw the experience or maybe your experience that you had before you'd gone there? What do you wish we did differently? Where are we harming mothers and women here? I feel as though we've done so much work in the last few years. And in the 12 years I was away, I feel like we've done so much around mental health and vulnerability. But I feel like it's still less accepted to be vulnerable here. We are still expected to present a sort of glossy exterior. and actually any big change, any new life stage, it can be staggeringly lonely and you feel so vulnerable.

6:49And it was so normal in Denmark that there are already things in place that you don't necessarily have to ask for. So when I had twins, it was normal for them to say, for example, my midwife or my doctor, if things ever get too much, the psychiatric ward's just there, just feel free to walk in. And I was thinking, well, actually, I'm kind of feel okay. Like I've done this once before this is just double the chaos and that's fine and it was normal to feel as though you're falling apart and you have that support around you to catch you and the system to catch you whereas here you know with social media and this idea of I don't know that people just seem to be a bit glossier and to give the the presentation of having it together a little more I would say And how do you think that helped you and how would it help here, do you think, if we were more honouring of matrescence, of that transition, of that unravelling to then rebuild?

7:44I think you would feel less alone I presume I think I've only done the new parenting in Denmark but from speaking to friends here it was very different the experience of how much parental leave people get the decision is much more in the individual here of depending on your finances and your circumstances of who goes back to work when and who gets to be a stay-at-home parent who wants to be a stay-at-home parent and I still feel moving back here now the pressure to be at the school gates at three o 'clock which is a massive financial luxury for for so many the idea that one parent cannot work or stop working in time to be there at 3 p.m and in Denmark most parents are working full-time 80 % of mothers work and and from the start so that actually there's less guilt because you you feel like you're going to work from eight till four and that's normal and so you you don't feel guilty and you feel that you are doing your best and that's kind of accepted how it is yeah I can't imagine that that is I think where so much of the guilt and comparison comes in particularly in the UK is everyone does it differently yes actually there's actually no families I can think of that have exactly the same yes everyone has different child care setups everyone has different amounts that they're working their partner if they have one is working and I think that gives rise to so much comparison and guilt isn't it you're right and it's so because you feel like it's all on you and that sort of intensive parenting trope of this idea that however our child turns out it's all on us and that pressure when actually you know nature and nurture it's a combination of everything but but yeah when they're in the Nordics where there is more of a system and everyone is doing things the same way for better and for worse of course I mean there are some people who feel in the Nordics that the way they want to do it is not respected and valued so much and so they feel a bit excluded but it really worked for me and my family and so here it feels like an intense pressure and I in Denmark I you know I had babies with these people so these were my sort of close best friends and you knew everything about their lives you knew how people did things because most people did them the same way whereas here I'm noticing that as you say every family is different yeah I'm endlessly fascinated I would happily stop everyone I meet in the street and sit them down and say how do you do daily life?

10:02Like from the one time you get up in the morning, how do you manage life? It's so varied. It's so diverse. And yeah, the individual decision making is quite arduous. It's quite a big pressure, actually. Yeah, because also at a time when you're going through that huge life transition, you're having to make massive decisions about, you know, do I go back to my previous job? Don't I go back to my previous job? Do I try and earn money another way? What childcare setup do I get? Even thinking about schooling, like it's, you're making really big decisions at a really vulnerable time. And I quite like the idea that there's a set way to do it.

10:37And it kind of takes some of those massive decisions away. Yeah, it was a real relief for me. I was very, I'm very, very grateful to having, having done that in a country where there was a system to sort of hold me. And how are mothers viewed in the Nordics? I mean, it's quite normal. The one thing is I was not in Copenhagen. I was in rural Uland. So when I first arrived with my husband and we'd had fertility treatment for years and really trying to start a family, there was no stigma to everyone asking me. So why haven't you got children? It was expected that you would follow this path, you know, a homogenous culture, that you would follow this path and become a parent.

11:14So motherhood is treated, I mean, it's not fetishised to the same degree that perhaps you see in the UK and the US, but it's kind of normal that you would have a family. And actually, people who don't have a family are encouraged to give the same priority to their life outside of the workplace as those who have caring responsibilities. So, for example, a friend without children could put in their diary at work, you know, 4 p.m. gym and it would be accepted that they would leave at that time every day or they'd have like running club or hobbies. And that was really nice because I feel like when I speak to friends here.

11:47So different. So different, right? Yeah, because if you don't have a family or if that's not the way you've chosen or that's not the way your life has gone, there can often be some resentment of, well, that person's leaving early or that person's doing something different. Whereas if everybody is given the grace to have a life outside of work, how refreshing, how nourishing. Yeah. And I love your perspective on happiness around the world and how it's so much of culture. Actually, we think that happiness is so individualized, but actually it's so intersects with the cultures that we're operating in.

12:21What are some of the headlines that you discovered about what makes kind of people in their environment happiest? And how does that kind of connect the dots to what you see you saw in mothers thinking about that? It's really interesting. I think I often think about the UK in terms of being on the map between like the US and Denmark. And in the UK, we're kind of in the middle of the two. So when I was looking at happiness around the world, I was quite interested in the US approach. We all get that kind of the Disney idea of a really extroverted jazz hands happiness, Richter's grin at all times.

12:54And actually life isn't like that. And a lot of the research showing that if we are not happy, it's bad for our health, for example, comes from the US where it's associated with because there is such a stigma around being sad, you are expected to be happy. and if you're not in that extroverted upbeat state all the time and if you're frightened of the opposite then yes being sad is more likely to make you unwell according to US studies whereas if you look at East Asian culture there is more nuance in between the idea where you can be having a tough time in one area of your life and getting great satisfaction and joy from another area at the same time there's this granularity and in China I was really interested and there's a concept called Xing Fu which is often translated as happiness, but actually doesn't refer to a good mood.

13:43It refers to a good life. And that's a life that has meaning. So there will be joy and there will be pain and tough times, but it's still meaningful. And actually the character for Zing derives from a character that was used to represent torture. So life will have pain, but it will have meaning. and I felt that was very helpful the idea that a good life and happiness doesn't mean not doing the tough stuff so I guess in terms of motherhood that comes back to the vulnerability for admitting when things are challenging doesn't mean that you're failing at life the idea that if we're not happy all the time we're failing I think doesn't us a massive disservice yeah I mean completely agree and it's so fascinating that's almost like that the kind of buddhist idea that you know life is suffering yes and and you know i think a lot of cultures again so so denmark the hygge thing has become very famous in recent years and this idea of like this cozy comforting time and just over the border you know connecting to germany at the base of jland where i lived if you go into germany they have something similar and my pronunciation for any german listeners gemutlichkeit as far as i understand is similar to the danish hygge but they expect to work hard and then have the nice cosy time.

15:01So rather than expecting the days to be full of these lovely, luxurious coffee breaks and cake and nice times, they expect to do a bit of hard slog and then you'll get your nice time. So even these tiny nuances, if we are aware of how other cultures do happiness or view the good life, I think it could be really helpful to pick and choose the bits that work for you. Yeah, I'm really curious about that. You've obviously written a lot of books at this point about, you know, how to be a Viking and the Danish experience and then happiness around the world. What bits from the research and the lived experience that you had are you taking into your life and your parenting and which have had the biggest impact?

15:42I'm always quite inspired by the, you know, the Japanese wabi-sabi, this idea of the beauty of imperfection and transience and ageing, especially as I enter my 40s and you think, well, I'm not shiny box fresh 20 something anymore. So how do I see value in this? And having two sons and a daughter and trying to model this idea of that people and have worth as you get older, as you gain experience is quite helpful. So when my children say, oh, your tummy is funny. It's like, yes, because I I grew three humans in it. Or the idea, you know, the Kintsugi idea of the ceramics being mended with metallic lacquers that the cracks are gilded.

16:26And that's what makes them beautiful. It's because of our scars that we're beautiful, not in spite of them. I also tend to be quite inspired by the Italian dolce faniente, the sweetness of doing nothing. because again having been raised in this in this sort of go go go quite high pressure environment growing up the idea of doing nothing is not something that comes naturally and it's not something I'm particularly good at but I'm trying to get better at that relaxing and trying to model that for my kids as well the idea that a bit like the Danish thing that you have value just because you exist if I can show them that I can sit and be bored and do nothing I think there's a real value in that and with the fast-paced world that we live in and with social media and screens I feel as though we are losing something you might feel the same that sometimes my best ideas will come when you're a bit bored or that you're staring out the window or staring at a wall and I feel like kids don't get to do that enough these days so that sort of doing nothing or the Swedish legum which is sort of just enough just right I think that's quite helpful yeah I love that just the rest because it's so counter-cultural yes in the uk we don't we don't really do rest no very well no it's not valued it's sort of seen as a slacking or not uh optimizing and yeah all these high performance podcasts and and tv shows and books and things and i just yes maybe we could optimize a bit less and now a quick word from our sponsors I don't need to tell you about the mental load, about how your mind never stops or about the low level stress that just follows us around everywhere but I do need to tell you about something that is going to help.

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19:06That's 30 % off with code MOTHERKIND. Just search Pop That Mama Sonic Rooms or just click on the link in the show notes. How do you think your experiences have shaped your parenting? What have you taken into parenting from the Danish way? So when I wrote How to Raise a Viking, I was interested because children in the Nordic country seem to grow up happier and healthier. And I wanted to know what they did differently as an outsider. And the trust is a big part and the infrastructure you grew up in is a big part. But things that you can do, that you can steal to use elsewhere that I was really inspired by are things like the emphasis on play and letting them run a bit wild.

19:48And not putting high academic expectations on a child, because if they are that way minded, they'll get there. or they won't and they'll resent you. Do they start school much later? Formal school at seven? Yeah, they start school at six in the Nordic countries apart from Finland, which is seven. Until then, you just play. And play is so important. There's two words for play in the Nordic languages. One that is for unstructured imaginative play and one that is for things like board games or music or sport. So play is really centred. They let children run wild. They let them take risks and use their body.

20:22So by age three, a child will be allowed to light the candles for dinner and there'll be candles with every mealtime, even in summer and letting children climb a tree. And so when I first moved back to the UK last year, I would let my daughter climb a tree very high. She's a good climber and she'd be quite high up a tree and parents would be a bit worried. And I have to say, no, it's it's fine. And just sort of asking if they do seem like they're in trouble, stuck up this tree, asking, do you have a plan or what's your plan, rather than assuming that they can't do something. So letting them take bodily risks.

20:56And again, England being between the US and Denmark on the map, I think the US litigious culture around health and safety has really influenced our approach in the UK. and I speak to teachers a lot who say that, you know, the paperwork, for example, you have to go through to take a child on a school trip is quite prohibitive. And in Denmark, that's less of a case. It's not perfect by any means, but there's more of an expectation that you would be doing a child a real disservice if you didn't let them use their body and take bodily risks. And actually, if you don't let them do that when they are children, they are more likely to try and seek out that adrenaline in the teenage years.

21:35So I'd much rather they climb a tree now than joyride later is my game plan. Same. Yeah. Time will tell. Up that tree, kids. Yeah. And what about kind of gender differences? I'm really interested in this. Is it much more normal that, you know, is parental leave got much better take up than kind of shared leave does here? How do you think that impacts things like the division of mental load and domestic? And is that different? and what can we learn from that? Yeah, again, it's not perfect, but it's better than here. So, you know, household chores are divided more equally. It's perfectly normal for men and women to take parental leave.

22:13There's even use it or lose it. So in Sweden, fathers take the most parental leave. I think it's 420 days. And there's even a phrase, the latte puppets for Swedish dads on parental leave. And there's lots of memes that go around. Search them up. You're in for a treat because of these sort of beautiful Swedish men in their skinny jeans with their great hair with their lattes and it's yeah it's much more normal so my husband took 10 weeks off to be with my son after my first baby so I could write my the year of living Danishly and it's it's really important it's that bonding experience early on and then yes it's perfectly normal to see dads that pick up and here I see far more mums that pick up still than dads but it's it's about 50 50 in my experience in Denmark and that there's still work to be done there's I think heads of heads of companies are still much more male in Denmark but it's normal for mums to work as I said so 80 % of mothers work and it just becomes you know the idea that nothing should be holding you back because you are female which is kind of how I grew up a little in that I grew up only child of a single mum.

23:24The Queen was on the throne. Margaret Thatcher was in charge. I went to an all-girls school. It never occurred to me that there was anything I couldn't do because I was a girl. And children growing up in Denmark, there's been a female PM for ever so long. And it just seems more normal that, of course, why wouldn't you be able to do all of the things that your brother can or your male friends can? And what do you think is about the UK, like having now sort of had the, you know, to compare the two experiences, is why is it do you think we haven't been able to move that way culturally more so shared leave is a failed policy less than two percent of fathers take it up what do you think those blockers are i think it's mad because it's not even if you are the most cynical person with no interest in children or families parental leave and um child care pays for itself there's studies in there that for every one dollar invested in early childhood education you get at least one dollar fifty back or$1.80.

24:21So even if you're just going for the bottom line, it makes sense. So I can only presume there's some really deep seated views. I do think that John Bowlby and attachment theory, which I'm sure you're familiar with and you're listening and we'll know, but the idea of in the 1940s, the World Health Organization commissioned John Bowlby to look into attachment theory. And he looked at children who were orphaned in the war and saw that children who grew up in institutions fared worse long term. But he extrapolated from that that anyone who was separated from their mother was therefore at a disadvantage.

24:55And this was really taken up in the UK and the US, which made many parents for many years very squeamish about early years childcare, about children going into nurseries or daycares. And in the Nordic countries, this was not taken up. There was more of an imperative getting women into the workforce post-World War II. so it was understood that there would need to be high quality childcare available for them. And it is high quality. I think I speak to people who run daycares here and childminders and it seems again down to that choice thing. A lot of the onus is on the parent to research and to find out what is available whereas in Denmark it's much more of a system that you will go to a high quality university educated pedagogue, so an early years educator.

25:42And it's not just a holding pen for children. they are learning things they're learning social skills from a really young age and caregivers have this policy they call it sitting on their hands and it means that they'll let children really little children around the age of two figure stuff out for themselves so they'll have to get themselves dressed to go outside into their little snowsuits or whatever or they'll have to resolve conflicts so parents can trust that their children are in a safe place they're being well looked after they're learning really useful social skills so danish parents feel like you're almost harming a child if you don't let them socialise.

26:17It's just so opposite to here, isn't it? Yeah. So opposite. Rather than feeling a kind of guilt. And also, you know, there's lots of research into families and allo parents. So someone other than the mother looking after children. And in Denmark, you'll have for really little children, maybe one pedagogue for five or six, seven children. So it's like a small family unit in the olden days when people had millions of children. So it's not mad. There is some basis behind it and it seems to work. It sounds like what's different is an instant understanding that childcare is infrastructure. Yes. And if you don't have quality, accessible, affordable childcare, you cannot grow the sort of economy that you want.

27:02It sounds like they got that and we still haven't got that here, I don't think. Although I would say, I think it's also important to point out that they weren't doing it out of pure altruism they were doing it because as i said like the bottom line it makes sense yes they wanted to get parents back to work and in sweden they had to really push when they first did paternity leave there were not dads in the street with placards saying oh please let us stay home with our babies they had to really nudge them to do it and they had to say you're going to use it or you're going to lose it and so it was government yeah pulling on their their big girl and big boy pants and saying this is how it's going to be and yeah leaving it into individual choice what do you Which was different in the UK?

27:41Well, this is very unpopular. Whenever I talk about this, I've been doing this about 10 years now, talking about different kind of approaches to the good life around the world. And whenever I speak in America, people always say, well, we want all that. That sounds great. How do we get it? I say, unfortunately, you have to tax a little higher. You know, you need taxes to fund these systems. And there is a real reluctance and, again, a real squeamishness to going for that, I think, in the US and the UK. I think on a level, on an individual level, we can all vote for policies that we think are going to be kinder to communities and to families.

28:18But I think on a personal level, I guess we can be aware of community and how important that is. No one is a rock, no one is an island. And showing vulnerability is kind of a superpower. And actually, it's the only way to break down these barriers and to get through to people. you know having just moved back here and moved into a new community actually i'm sure many people will be familiar with this that you don't really connect with someone unless there is a show of some vulnerability otherwise it's just it's just an artifice it's just surface so if we could all just stop pretending we're so glossy and show our vulnerabilities that might help a little yeah you think that would connect us more therefore enable us to feel more part of something Yeah, I think belonging is something I'm really interested in.

29:06And I think if we don't have, as you say, the infrastructure here that makes that automatic, then we do have to seek it out. And that's quite hard. It's quite arduous, but it's always well worth it. It is really hard. How did you build that community when you moved back here? hard really hard i think it's it's staggeringly lonely when you leave and you move somewhere new and as everyone is speaking to friends here who've moved to a different part of the country so many people do it with young children we did it we moved from london where i had a community to bournemouth i knew not one person i actually knew one friend of a friend yeah and she had two boys that were older so it wasn't a natural easy you know i've got two young girls it was so hard i It's so hard, isn't it?

29:51Yeah, it is so lonely. And I think there's been times where I think I've nailed it. And then other times you think, oh, my God, I just, so I'm a year in now. And there's still times you think, what, what have I done? I just left all my best friends. I don't, yeah, what am I doing? I think when I moved to Denmark, I didn't have children yet. And I was very tenacious. And I was, I can put my work hat on and be braver than I would be ordinarily. I think I'm doing this for research. It's fine. Yeah. And so I think I can always default to that. But it's really hard. It's really hard to make new connections.