A small minority of us were drawn to Denmark a few Decades ago due to the reputation the Danes had for being compassionate and well orderly – hence the Welfare State much touted. The well orderly side of the Danish system has resulted in a very organized channeling procedure that takes a newborn Dane-to-be (for a person is not born a Dane, rather, one becomes one) plonks it on a conveyor belt, puts it through the woiks (pronounce with NY accent) and plops it out at the end able to BE Danish. Live, breathe, eat and sleep DANISH. It’s a process, some might say.
The whole beautiful morphing begins at birth. You are immediately labelled and tested, but don’t expect to be told what blood group your child is as that is classified information..after all, why would you need to know?
Your child now has a national registration number stamped on it’s rump and is ready to be fattened up. Midwives see to it that the child is in fit state to be fattened up and if necessary substitute mothers milk with a mysterious government substance, probably made by Carlsberg, that is given to the child at two hourly intervals.
The next contact person you meet will be your health visitor, pronounced: SUND-HEDS-PLEYERRR (health carer), who will come into your home at regular intervals. Now health visitors who come and check on the newly hatched mothers are a worldwide phenomena, and any wise woman knows that so much can depend on the personality of these women. If you get a bitch of a one, O God help you, she will ruin your life, but a nice one can be like a friend.
Not a real friend, but LIKE a friend, one of those who is nice to your face but actually comes round to see if you are still in your dressing gown at 10am and if so writes nasty notes about you to her superiors (*Licks pencil, sticks tongue out in concentration and writes: “..is….still….in…dress-ing…gown, watching…Oprah…and baby…is not…speaking….Danish…knows..nothing…about….herring…Immediate repossession …of…child….advisable…Order replacement…DANISH wife for poor Danish…husband..”*).
It is the health visitor who comes to your house who is pivotal in your childs beginnings as a fledgling Dane. It is she who gently places your child in the right rut. And boy are they good at their job! Lulled into a false security and the right to be with your offspring for about six months,you will find yourself magically transported to the land of being a newly hatched Danish mother, your child subtly siphoned off you bit by bit.
You will be encouraged to sit in groups of women just like you. If you are a young mother (in Denmark that is anyone under 34) you will be put in a mother’s group of same, and a well trained health visitor will aim talks about how to ‘cope on your own what with you being so young at 34′ and liase with TV crews to publicly document your feckless youthful stumblings into motherhood.
If you are an older mother, a handicapped mother, a somalian mother, a one legged blue bottomed baboon mother with spikes coming out of your three heads, or a royal mother, for example, you will be streamed accordingly. A place for everything and everything has a place in Denmark.
Your child will be weighed and measured and everything will be noted down. It is important we know what sort of child your is turning out to be, because these days, we can tell early and there are places for kids like that.
So fast forward…it’s time to say goodbye, it’s next Wednesday and your kid is now starting to form an attachment to you and this is the hallowed ‘Time of Ripping Child from Mother and erm…putting it with someone more qualified to do job’. You now have a choice!
The next stage is: DAGPLEJMOR (daycare ‘mother’) or a VEGGESTUE (daycare). A daycare mother is a woman who wants five children of EXACTLY the same size (I mean it, they all have to be the same centimeters) in her home, from 6.30-5.30 and get paid for taking excellent care of them. The children grow to be able to walk at the same pace, play at the same pace and sleep at the same pace. If you choose this option, you will be assigned a daycare ‘mother’ by the local authorites, if you don’t like the one your are given, you may refuse and be allocated another (it’s like the lottery), but BEWARE, if you get a reputation amongst the local daycare mothers for being choosy, you may find your kid becomes the runt of their litters.
You are not allowed to keep going back and back to the local authorities and asking for a different daycaremother, this is not allowed. Generally speaking the official line is that you can say No twice but then you get what you are given you ungrateful cow.
I will detail the pros and cons of using a daycaremother to take care of your offspring at a later date.
The other option at this stage is a VUGGESTUE, a daycare center, this is the place you break your kid in, so to speak. The earlier you get your kids into the system the better, so some find that bypassing the daycaremother option and going straight to the bricks and mortar set up with a ‘team’ of professionals to take care of your kid in shifts, that this is better in the long run.
I mean, you don’t want your kid to be the one in the corner rocking itself and at the age of 4 sitting in the same nappy for half the day do you? The author has worked in daycare, and assures you that children who come later to daycare (that is, those who spend more time getting used to their parents as caregivers) – they have the very hardest time. Rule of thumb is, kids don’t miss what they never had, so the aim is: don’t give them something they might miss.
And it is within the walls of the daycare center, which may or may not be integrated with a BØRNEHAVE (kindergarten), that a child begins to settle into the routines of institutional life.
After BØRNEHAVEN comes a Danish SKOLE (self explanatory) and then comes EFTERSKOLE. Efterskole is boarding school and is exactly the same as VUGGESTUE but with bigger kids. It has the same institutional vibe, the same teams of careworn and alcohol pickled PÆDAGOGS (the people better qualified than parents to take care of children) taking perpetual coffee breaks and writing notes on kids and the same forced and efficient cheeriness.
There will be camp fires, and ‘get to gethers’ and group activities, and rye bread. It’s the same but the kids are bigger. If there are any problems the parents will be called in and they will sit at a formica table with a bowl of sweets in the middle and the pædagogs will keep jumping up and down to get one more coffee cup or the milk. It’s all totally normal.
The difference between Efterskole and vuggestue is that this time, your children are leaving home.
Some might say that efterskole is the lighter version of putting your kids in care, and it is rather like a glorified orphanage. Still, the teenagers get a lot out of it, and return home every second weekend much more malleable.
Many parents breathe sighs of relief when it is time for their kids to go to efterskole, and it is a very popular and relatively affordable option for children in the 14-16 year old age group. Just at the phase when kids get totally annoying there is an option! Send them off to boarding school where teams of professionals will work in shifts to see them through that year of being utterly useless.
It’s all made worthwhile for the kids and plenty of older Danshish look back on their time at efterskole with great nostalgia and longing. Nothing ever quite compares to that first cigarette, that first time you got drunk, that first time…
Some people prefer their kids to do efterskole because they don’t want to witness their teenagers burgeoning sexuality and it is true that efterskole has a reputation for being a hotbed of turgid activity.
From the outside it can look like parents are just giving up, but on the positive note, you know, if you are working your ass off, and your kids are under your feet and you don’t know what in the world to do with them, then efterskole is a good option. It’s cheap too, and government subsidised.
And most of all, it creates independance in children, which is after all the most important thing. We need our children to be independent enough to be part of a an exiled group huddling together and separated from instinct. Otherwise, and if they are not able to function away from their mama’s, how on earth are they going to get to work on time? How on earth is SHE going to get to work on time? Because after all, it’s all about getting to work.
After efterskole comes further education. Or prison.
Having said that if you are a non dane and visited people in vuggestue, in efterskole, in prison and mental hospital..you will notice that it is the same set up, very humanistic in that sense, the same respect is extended to all the inmates. But at the end of the day, it always ends up with a meeting around a formica table with a bowl of sweets in the middle and a stack of papers relating to the case.
But yeah, that is how it works, you do this, then you do that and you keep doing it and then you go into an old peoples home and die.
*sigh* Make the most of it, after all, you are paying for it.
THIS HAS BEEN A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT.
