Ruth Institute Blog

It is early September. The sun is still very bright but the air is getting cool this far up in the northern hemisphere. Fall has begun, and with fall also schools and daycares. The park is full of children running around in yellow reflective vests. My 18-month-old son stares with amazement at them as they dig in the sand and climb the play structures.

Here we go again, I sigh. All summer we were able to play peacefully in the park, but now I will have to be on my guard. In the summer, the children came to the park with their parents. Now, however, they come “alone together”.

A little boy is sitting on a bench crying, his face buried in his hands. His caregiver tells me that he misses his sister who has left the daycare group and started school. He cries bitterly and it is impossible not to feel compassion for him. I try to focus on my son’s play but unpleasant feelings are stirring within me. Their source is not difficult to fathom.

When I was 13 months old, my well-meaning mother put me in the stroller, rolled me down the hill and “delivered” me to the nearest government-subsidized daycare center. From then on, I spent most of my waking hours with strangers. From then on, we spent only two or three hours as a family every evening. My mother tells me that my older sister was barely six months old when she met the same fate. But we were not a special family in this regard. The overwhelming majority of all Swedish children have been brought up this way for over four decades. Few other countries can boast such a record. My own experience has led me to ponder this whole phenomenon.

Daycare for young children is taken for granted in Sweden. Children are generally between 13 and 18 months old when they start. To put your child in daycare at two years old is universally considered late – a deviation from the norm.

The most outspoken critic of this system, Jonas Himmelstrand, is currently living in exile with his family on a Finnish island because he and his wife also insist on homeschooling their children, which is illegal in Sweden. But that has not stopped him from talking about the flaws in the Swedish system. Earlier this year he was speaking in Britain, where he described how academic performance in Swedish schools has plummeted since the 1980’s from among the best down to below average in, for instance, math. Discipline problems are now also among the worst in Europe. He ascribes this to early daycare because it fosters peer-orientation, which is detrimental to psychological maturation and learning. As a matter of fact, psychological problems among schoolgirls have tripled in the last 30 years. Could there be a connection?

My son settles down in the sandbox. The feel of the sand makes me remember a mom I met yesterday. Her twins were crawling all over the toys in the sand and she was struggling to manage both of them alone. They were 13 months old. Observing them, I tried to picture myself at their age, barely able to stand on my feet. “They’re a handful,” the mother acknowledged, “and they just started daycare.” I smiled, trying to conceal my true feelings. At least they have each other, I thought. “They’ve been waking up with nightmares lately, but hopefully they’ll soon settle in.” Frequent nightmares, isn’t that a sign of trauma?

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