Freezer baby parking

This time I will write about what I consider the most unusual Danish tradition I have seen, parking babies out in the cold.

I moved to Denmark at the end of February. Temperatures were hovering around 0 degrees for the next three weeks with a more or less constant drizzle, so weather was far from ideal. With that kind of weather, one day I am coming home from work and I see 5 or six baby-strawlers parked at the courtyard of the building where I lived in Copenhagen. I was totally out of myself! I even saw a mom coming out with a baby-strawler, parks it outside and casually goes back up to her apartment. So she just left her baby outside in the cold and rain!

When I entered the apartment I described the horror that I just witnessed but Al'Shadar was completely un-phased by it. She just shrugged it of and said: "What of it? We do it constantly and it is healthy for the babies to sleep out in the cold." I must say that at first I took it as something completely mental. Throughout march, Copenhagen was littered with babies sleeping out in the cold.

I became curious about the custom and was asking people what is that all about. I was trying to figure out why are they doing it, for how long in the year are they doing it, how and where did the custom start. From Danes I got the first part and second part of the answer. It is consider that it is healthy for children to sleep out in the cold, they also managed to convinced me that it is quite safe. Babies are tucked in good and they are not freezing, on the contrary, parents often overdress them, they are under constant surveillance with the help of the baby monitor and parents instantly reacts when the baby starts crying. Also, babies sleep out in the cold for as long the temperatures outside are lower then the temperatures indoors and that is the case for at least 6 months in a year, from October to March.

But nobody could tell me how and when did this unusual custom start. Also, the claims that it is healthy for the children was always only on the level of common knowledge and as something that everybody does and knows. When I said that in Croatia I could imagine social services going out if they found out you are doing it, Danes were quite surprised. Since I couldn't get an answer I had to look it up.

The custom started on Iceland in early 20th century during a tuberculosis epidemic. Pedagog David Thorsteinsson in 1926. suggested that putting healthy children out in the baby-strawlers could be a good way of isolating them from the sick children so they don't get infected. From there the custom spread to all Scandinavian countries. Today it is a common practice among parents it is even considered as a bullet-proof evidence of good parenting. 

 

But still is it healthy for real? As it turns out it actually is. In 1990 a study was conducted by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. The study showed that children that spent six to nine hours outside per week were significantly less sick when compared to children that spent between one and five hours outside per week. Finnish scientist Marjo Tourula did a study on infants sleeping outdoors and she realized that children are sleeping significantly longer when sleeping in the cold compared to when they are sleeping on room temperatures.

So to conclude, weirdish custom that could terrify my Croatian relatives if I were to practice it is actually very healthy and beneficial to children. 

 

So please, if you visit Denmark or any other Scandinavian country and see baby parking on the streets at sub-zero temperatures please compose yourself and don't call the social services, you are witnessing a very normal Danish custom.