Interestingly, Finnish children spend way less time with school and homework tha...

pavlov · on Jan 10, 2011

I was born in Finland in 1980. My childhood was seemingly the polar opposite of this so-called "Chinese mom" model.

I never had a guided hobby or one that would have been forced upon me, except for one time when I was six years old. (My parents enrolled me in a children's ballet class. Presumably they thought that it would be good for my body consciousness, or something. After six months I asked them if I had to do it. They said "no", so I quit, and that was that.)

Instead I was encouraged to come up with my own activities. I always felt that my parents had great expectations of me, but at the same time they were careful to never actively formulate those expectations into action points. That gave me a sense of responsibility: I knew I was just a child, but at the same time I had been entrusted the serious responsibility of deciding what I should do with my life. Should it include modern art or maybe egyptology? The best way to figure that out was to read books about it. If my parents didn't have a suitable book, I could always walk a few blocks to the library. My friends' lives had a similar degree of liberty. I don't remember us ever minding homework; it was something you could take care of in 15 minutes -- or the next morning at school, if you were feeling lucky.

Probably the general atmosphere in Finland in the 1980s played a role in making my childhood such a happy one. In retrospect, those were the "halcyon days" when the Finnish social democracy was complemented by an upstart liberalization drive that pulled the country out of the Brezhnevian gloom and stagnation of the '70s. The fun didn't last long: in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and pulled Finland into a recession, as the Finnish economy had become too reliant on ridiculously profitable exports to the bankrupt Soviet empire. The social(ist) ambience never really recovered.