Sometimes it takes a single snapshot to get an accurate perspective of your life and where it’s headed. After a few laughs and the prerequisite Facebook post, I stared at the picture again. For a very long time.
I thought of myself as a relatively educated, down-to-earth (albeit neurotic) American who grew up in a working class family of Filipino immigrants. I thought I knew and understood the value of things. Or so I thought. Now as a stay-at-home mom married to a Dutch entrepreneur, I wanted to provide our son with the best possible life – and all the happy childhood memories I didn’t get to have.
And yet, this picture taken on an ordinary day left me unsettled. Several questions started following, one right after the other. Did my baby really need all these things for a happy childhood? Was having all these toys instrumental in enhancing his development? Why do we even have so many toys when they obviously failed to entertain him for more than two minutes?
From the moment I became pregnant, I was inundated with messages of baby and toddler essentials. They were strategically placed marketing campaigns with lofty promises of helping first-timers like me navigate the minefield of parenthood. Perhaps it was also because I was going to raise a baby in a foreign country far from family. Or simply because we naively bought into the idea that by being 110% prepared, we’d have the happiest baby on the block. What ever the case, my husband and I were the perfect consumers, spending an embarrassingly extravagant amount on anything and everything related to baby. Nothing but the absolute best for our bundle of joy as far as we were concerned.
But this single picture made me re-visit my role as a mother and really delve into the more challenging question- what was best for my son? Leaning into my mommy intuition, I got a giant moving box and threw 97% of all his toys inside to be donated to the local church. What was shown in the picture was only a fraction of all the toys my son actually had (let’s not even discuss his extensive library of books and impressive wardrobe).
I also had my light-bulb moment of trying to see how other parents around me were raising their kids. It’s worth mentioning that we were starting to feel (and still do) the financial strain of being a single-income household. Life in the Netherlands can be prohibitively expensive with much higher tax rates, comparatively lower salaries and generally higher costs of living. Yet the Dutch remain among the happiest people in the world. And since happy parents generally raise happy kids, I decided to start making mental notes about Dutch parenting and share what I observed.
I discovered that the real, ultimate secret to the relative success of Dutch parenting (success meaning raising well-adjusted, happy, responsible, self-confident children) was actually a simple one. It’s the gift of time. The Dutch (both moms and dads) have a lot of time to give to their children. AND that children have the time to simply be children.
As the part-time work champion of Europe (and thus arguably the world), the Dutch work the least amount of hours in any industrialized nation, averaging only around 29 hours a week. Dutch laws passed in 1996 and 2000 enabled workers to reduce their hours to a part-time schedule while maintaining job security, determining their own schedule, hourly pay, paid vacation days, healthcare and other pro-rated benefits. The four day workweek, especially among working moms, is more the norm rather than the exception. Dutch dads are also beginning to embrace the new status quo, choosing to work part-time and having their own “Papa day” to play a more equal role in childrearing. In a way, Dutch parents can have it all – be successful part-time professionals such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, consultants, secretaries and even entrepreneurs and still have the time and energy for their children. The choice of working part-time, full time or staying at home aren’t even valid options for most families in the United States.
Rather than buying into the myth of quality time, Dutch parents recognize that what their children need most is their presence. The quality of their relationships with their child(ren) is largely dependent on the quantity of time fostering the parent-child relationships in everyday routines. Dutch parenting seems to be about fully engaging in the mundane realities of life – waking up, getting ready for the day, going to and from school, mealtimes, laundry, and bedtime (rinse and repeat). And in between those times, Dutch parents do a lot of talking. They cultivate and foster dialogue with their children from the moment they’re born. After all, part of Dutch culture is having an opinion and it starts as soon as the children can open their mouths and babble.
While Dutch parents working only part-time may also mean a lot less fancy toys and gadgets, no Dutch child seems to genuinely feel they’ve missed out on something truly essential. Quite the opposite actually. In fact, some would suggest (including newly reformed “Dutchified” me) that Dutch children are better off and happier having less material stuff and more, much more of their parents who are a whole lot less stressed out. After all, isn’t it the culmination of the little moments in daily life that shaped our own childhood memories?
While we’re at it, there’s really no such thing as mompetition in the Netherlands. Dutch parenting doesn’t revolve around the anxiety-driven endeavor to be perfect parents raising super brilliant children as much as simply being good enough parents raising well-adjusted kids. There’s a lot less emphasis in expensive educational toys, personal computers, after-school activities, ballet and piano lessons, enrichment classes and test-prep courses. In fact, some would even argue that those things are quintessentially un-Dutch and more American. Here in the Low Country, it’s more about parents sitting down and listening to the children’s day at school, regularly eating meals together around the family table, reading stories, taking walks in the forests, dunes or to the local park, maybe (just maybe) doing some arts and crafts, and most definitely letting the children play outside and bike around (weather permitting).
“Doe maar gewoon, dat is gek genoeg (Just act normal, that is crazy enough)” is a Dutch cultural philosophy that also translates into letting children simply be children – free to discover, explore, make mistakes, use their imagination and play. The Dutch fully recognize and acknowledge that childhood only happens once. There’s absolutely no rush, no frantic concern over milestones being met. And our Northern European friends have long figured out that trying to raise the smartest, most accomplished child has no semblance what- so- ever on actual, genuine, long-lasting happiness.
One could even argue that Dutch parenting is actually universal parenting. The biggest difference (and which makes all the difference), however, is that the Dutch live in an egalitarian society that actually supports parents. And I’m simply grateful for living in a society that allows me to give and let my child have a simple, carefree childhood with all the time he can possibly hope for.
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