trying to put swedish daycare in perspective

Coming off paternity leave, I feel like a decent parent.  Not smug, really, because I know that I got lucky to live in Sweden, where I could take leave, and not be forced to either work long hours or make a huge decision to quit and be a stay at home dad.  But, still, I think I made a decent showing of my time as a stay-at-home parent.

Now I drop off my son at daycare, and I feel like the worst parent ever.  He is fine overall, I think, but the leaving is the stuff of parent horror.

Dwelling on his sadness, I nitpick and get unhappy with the daycare – the groups are too big, the playground too muddy, why is his big sister in an annex location and not in the yard to take care of him?

I don’t know the first thing about American daycares.  I kind of assume that a decent daycare or preschool is on par with the ones in Sweden.  I mean, Swedes don’t exactly gush over their daycare system.

Then I watched this video from DadLabs, and they do gush over the Swedish preschool they visited back in 2008.  I can’t say that my kids’ facility is quite this nice – no organic food – but my children do have their own chef, “nodes” for smaller groups, kid-sized sinks and tables and the like.

Plus, his sister does play in his yard a couple times a week.   Today E said she saw them walking hand in hand as she was leaving.  So maybe I have not abandoned my boy in the worst possible way.

Just feels like it sometimes.

it’s easier to leave Daddyland when everyone else has been there too

I do not have stable mornings right now.  I swing from complete routine – getting everyone dressed and out the door, just like always – to the horror of seeing my son fall apart when I shove him at a daycare teacher.  I have a moment of peace on the train and then fall into a less visceral but more existential despair as the train approaches Kista – the Silicon Valley of Scandinavia, also known as a mall and a bunch of office buildings in the middle of nowhere.  We pour out of the train – only the largely immigrant locals provide any color – a mass of tech workers funneling through one door and down one stair, just mingling and colliding.

Then I get to the office, and everything takes on a human scale again.  I like my job, and I like my co-workers but it goes deeper, I think, especially in the first days outside Daddyland.  The thing is – probably a majority of my co-workers are also parental leave exiles.  They’ve been off for months, maybe multiple times.  They’ve done the in schooling.  They have worked part-time.  And the ones that don’t have kids, well, they are influenced by the greater culture.

So it is a welcoming crowd outside Daddyland, one that is shockingly interested in my son’s adjustments, in my feelings about leaving the sand box.  There is a uniformity to Swedish experience that just doesn’t exist in America – for better and for worse.  Here in Sweden, especially in 2010 with more and more dads taking paternity leave, you don’t have stay at home moms.   You don’t have kids in daycare at six weeks.  You don’t have workaholic dads (OK, you got plenty but lots less than before).

It’s nice.  My son, by the way, has attached to all sorts of things in the past week.  He never showed any interest in blankets or bears or even pacifiers.  Now he wears his rain pants all afternoon and evening.  I know how he feels, and I feel quite certain that my co-workers would probably understand if I came to work clutching a large spoon that reminded me of Baby B, for some unknown reason.

preschool play and new sand at the park make sweden stand out

They dumped a whole load of new sand into the sandbox across the street from our building.  Huge mounds of silky, rock and twig-free sand.  It is a sand builder’s dream, still damp under the dry surface.  Suddenly, all of our sand toys work perfectly, even the stupid crab, whose little legs always get filled with stuck sand.

It is like I am one of those Tibetan monks who make elaborate sand mandalas.

Or not. I am more like an American dad who makes a series of sand frogs that look oddly like ancient religious idols, which are then smashed by his 17-month-old son.

Still, the lesson in impermanence is the same. I like my sand frogs, and they do not last.

I do have a serious point here though. The city of Solna replenishes the sand in this sand box every year. Talk about a commitment to the kids; there are many, many sand boxes in Solna. This is a subtle reason to love Daddyland.

The biggest Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, just ran a big series on how good it is for children to play outside. This seems self-evident to me. Do we really need research to prove that kids should be out in the forest and not inside on a summer day?

It appears so. But the research showed that kids that played in a preschool yard filled with uneven obstacles and mixed trees and rocks and playgrounds focused better than kids with a boring, flat playground.

And this is why we have stuck with NK’s preschool, even if we get grumpy about bigger class sizes and the way they handled her milk allergy. She has a forest for a yard. Literally. And now her younger brother will have a forest for a yard come this fall.

Now there are many boring, small yards at preschools in Solna. But there are also a fair amount of really cool ones – all at this amazing, subsidized price.

I do not want to even think what we would have to pay in the U.S. for a preschool setting like this.

So sand and pine trees and rocks. Pretty fundamental reasons why Sweden is paradise for families with small children.

my son is the mayor of the preschool yard

I have this problem with the Swedish parental leave system.  I always feel bad expressing because I’ve gained so much … but then I express it anyway.  I do not like that kids are essentially forced into daycare between 12 and 24 months.  You get the amazing parental leave but then, bam, back to work (even if at only 75% as is my right under Swedish law).

And I’ve had the feeling that Baby B was too small, that 19 months was too small for him.  I’ve just hoped that he would grow up fast, that what everyone says about 18-month-olds being a good age is true.

Then we took him to the preschool summer party today.  And the kid owned the yard.  He wandered high and low, leading with his still big belly, poking his head in playhouses, climbing over fences, getting hugged by bigger kids.

He even got a little loud, just yelling for the fun of it as he ran down a hill.

So maybe he is ready, and maybe he will love the forested yard at the daycare, and maybe he will thrive where he can sit in a sandbox for hours and wander in a bigger space and play with more people than his mother, father and sister.

Maybe.

He still got shy today.

He’s still my baby.

(Yes, this is what happens to men on paternity leave.)

Starting daycare there, starting daycare in Sweden – Weekly Link

Over at Dadwagon, one of the posters just started his toddler in daycare in New York:

Isn’t it supposed to be harder than this? In preparation for today, I’ve been reading various Websites for advice—give the kid a favorite toy or favorite food, bring a family photo the teacher can show her—and we’ve been carefully referring to it as “school” not “day care” or “babysitting.” And we limited our time in the classroom so she wouldn’t expect us to be there all day.

Huh. I guess those things work. The only thing we weren’t prepared for is that Sasha wouldn’t really need us around.

And here is what I posted there.  It goes to what I wrote about on Tuesday, my real ambivalence on daycare and having my kids in it so young.  It is the true downside of the Swedish system.  Everyone gets all this time, but we all only get this much time.  I shudder at the thought of leaving Baby B when he is 19 months old.  I know that is so old in many contexts but he does not seem so old.

Here in Sweden, all kids start daycare between 12 and 24 months. And everyone gets about a one to two week “in schooling” they call it. So parents go every day and then start leaving a little longer and a little longer.

Seems to work, though since our in schooling took a little longer, I got to see the mass chaos of a yard full of screaming toddlers. I think on some level this is the dirty secret the teachers try to hide from us – the mass wailing and despair that goes on for a good while.

My kid loves it now, of course. But I must admit that it made me wish I could stay home longer. You know, kindergarten seems right.

Negotiating the luxuries of Swedish child care

Daddyland is luxury.  Daddyland is choices.  Daddyland is freedom, so much so that an American immigrant can lose his bearings.

Take the issue of daycare and siblings.  In Solna, when I am on paternity leave, I “get” 30 hours of daycare a week for my older child – at the same old price, which is so cheap you don’t even think about it.  Other cities give you 15 hours a week but both Solna and surrounding Stockholm are at 30 – that is six hours a day at almost no cost while I am home with the baby and getting paid for it.

There are three main justifications I have heard for this luxury.  It is for the older child so they don’t get stuck at home and can continue to socialize and develop.  Or, it is for the younger child who deserves the full attention of mommy or daddy, undiluted by the older sibling.  Or, it is for the sleepless, overwhelmed parents who need the daily break in order to provide the best home possible for their kids.

Solna tried to go to 15 hours a week a few years ago.  People went nuts.  The city dropped it.

So this is cool.  It is not my battle to fight one way or another.  I am too new to Daddyland.  But that is the problem:  I am not Swedish.  On some level, I do not understand getting 30 hours of subsidized child care when one parent is at home.

I can adjust my mind to paternity leave.  I can imagine preschool – in the US, NK at three and a half years old would go to preschool.  But 30 hours?  What do I do with that?

For I feel guilty that NK does not get as much time with me.  But then if I do keep her at home, I feel guilty towards Baby B – who really does like the quieter time with Daddy and will have no parents on leave at all when he is three and a half.

I am also tired.  I also want to write.

So I am left to find my own balance, which is NK stays at home on Fridays and will likely stay home another half day a week.  At that point I begin to feel we approach American preschool levels, and she is three and a half and not nearly so tired in the evenings anymore, and with E studying, we will be spending huge chunks of time up at our country cottage.

And she will probably catch three colds in March and be home the whole time, and I will pull my hair out and dream of those 30 hours.

my first foray into daddyland – the open preschool

I ventured into the heart of Daddyland the other day, alone with Baby B for the first time, a place where parents drink coffee, talk baby sleep and watch their children steal toys from each other.

I went to open preschool. A public open preschool. Just think, not only does the Swedish state pay me 80 percent of my salary to stay at home with my baby (yes, I realize it is really the taxpayers who are paying) but it also provides me with a place to take my kid, complete with teachers, coffee and all the other parents who need a place to go on a snowy February day (I cannot go outside because Baby B does not walk, and he absolutely hates wallowing around in the snow in his snowsuit and boots).

Not everywhere in Sweden has open preschools, but we live within easy access to three and a simple bus ride to two more. I want to try them all – this is my adventure in Daddyland, so to speak – but for shy Baby B’s sake, I go to the old favorite, the place he goes with his mother and has gone with his big sister. Still, he clung to me tight, almost hiding inside my flannel shirt, just looking around, my loud little boy gone charmingly quiet.

Open preschools are usually a refuge for first time parents, and now I know why. I got so bored. I realized after a few minutes that my Swedish has improved immensely, so that I understand conversations going on around me.

Sleep, teething, sleep, teething.

Now, I am in the midst of sleep troubles and teething the like I could never have imagined with NK. But, still, after all these years, I do not need to hear about other kids’ sleep and teething troubles. And I do not need to talk about ours.

I want to talk about the Super Bowl, which is a tough sell in Sweden, though not for a lack of guys. There were three, including me, which is a low number, actually. I need to ask the teachers sometime how open preschool has changed with the huge increase in paternity leave in recent years. For guys come almost more than women, perhaps a little more lost in Babyland, which is much bigger and scarier place than Daddyland, for sure.

So I stayed quiet, and no one spoke to me, even though I held a loud five minute conversation with the teacher in Swedish, almost to signal to them that I spoke their language. Nope, still scared them off. I understand that this comes more out of a communal shyness than coldness (at least I understand it intellectually) but to an American conditioned to small talk and chat (even a quiet American needs the chatting …), it is not fun to be ignored.

But I had a friend hugging me inside my flannel shirt, and I haven’t been thinking about the Super Bowl much yet, so I did that on my own. And it was nice to be out of the cramped apartment and into Daddyland, and I will be back.