There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids by Linda Åkeson McGurk

"When Swedish-born Linda McGurk moved to small-town Indiana with her American husband to start a family, she quickly realized that her outdoorsy ways were not the norm. In Sweden children play outside all year round, regardless of the weather, and letting young babies nap outside in freezing temperatures is not only common--it is a practice recommended by physicians. In the US, on the other hand, she found that the playgrounds ... were mostly deserted ... Struggling to fit in and to decide what was best for her children, McGurk turned to her own childhood for answers. Could the Scandinavian philosophy of 'there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes' be the key to better lives for her American children?"--

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley, though it has not influenced my thoughts or opinions about this book.

Though I'm not a parent, I'm strangely intrigued by cultural parenting books in the vein of French Kids Eat Everything and Bringing Up Bébé. With the rise of hygge obsession in the English-speaking world, I was delighted to see a book about Scandinavian parenting pop up.

While most memoirs about parenting or cultural differences tend to make too many generalizations with anec-data instead of actual data, McGurk's book does just the opposite. She cites dozens of studies about why Scandinavian-style parenting is often much healthier for children. What she fails to acknowledge is how dramatically different the U.S. and Sweden are demographically and culturally.

With shinrin yoku (forest bathing) and books like The Nature Fix becoming popular, I think that this book has a fitting audience. There are certainly some nuggets here for current parents and future parents to ponder as they develop their parenting style. I would just say that for Americans, some of her cultural critiques should be acknowledged in context.

Fairly straightforward but I tend to fetishize anything European so I throughly enjoyed it. Spoiler alert...

...any book that ends with a half-Swedish family moving back to the States is a tragedy in my books.