When I was growing up, the idea that you could learn something from your children wasn’t on the radar screen. If there were parents who felt this way, it was because they were weak and not prepared to take responsibility. In more recent times, rock stars and others have made this modern wisdom, but I am not certain whether it is an idea whose worth has genuinely been digested.
Since I’m an ‘invandrakvinna’ (immigrant woman) with Swedish children, I’ve learned much of what I know about the country that is my home from them. When they were young, they forced me to sit watching Astrid Lindgren’s immortal ’Alla vi Barn i Bullerbyn’ (The Bullerbyn Children) with them over and over again. I learned to sing ‘Små Grodorna’ (Little Frogs) dancing around a midsummer pole with all of the attendant crouching and hand motions. I learned what a proper Lucia has to be equipped with just before Christmas.
Recently, I learned some astounding things from them about this country. At an exhibition they arranged at their countryside school they explained to me that the inventor of the classic Coca Cola bottle was a Swede named Alexander Samuelsson (1862-1934). Swedes have a reputation for soaking up American culture easily (many immigrated, of course), but who would have thought? The inventor of the zipper, for which I am sure most of us are eternally grateful, was also a Swede (Gideon Sundback, 1880-1954). The pacemaker, the adjustable wrench and the de Laval nozzle (used in modern rocket engines) are among many other items that Swedes invented during a concentrated period of history that seemed to churn out one great invention after another.
How did this happen? The flourishing of engineering companies and a critical period in the Industrial Revolution when young men aspired to become the heroes that inventors were considered to be is one explanation. However, digging deeper, one finds that it may well have boiled down to something more basic. Society began to pay attention to the importance of children for the future and with this the critical need to educate them. The introduction of universal primary education by the Swedish Parliament in 1842 made Sweden one of the first countries to recognize the importance of education to development.
What goes around comes around. Maybe if we listened more to our children we’d learn more about how to make our society one that all of us would enjoy living in more. And wouldn’t it be fun to see King Carl XVI Gustaf shaking the hand of a Swede over a future Nobel Prize?
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For a collection of great Swedish organizations that listen to children, see my list of links in this blog.
(((Yes!)))
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