Dutch children are unusually happy and healthy. Is it because of the Avondvierdaagse?
1d 16h ago by feddit.uk/u/Wudi in mildlyinteresting from www.theguardian.com
This is where we are as a society. We're here. We're at a place and time where a certain group of children are happy, and the media reports it as "Unusually happy and healthy".
As opposed to being diseased and miserable, like the rest of us!
I mean
Dutch kids are consistently judged to be some of the happiest in the world.
They're not just happy, they're ranked as happiest in the world. That will always be unusually happy.
I have to assume that it's not just the avondvierdaagse, but more so the mentality here that kids can roam freely and play without their parents having to protect them at every moment. Something they do name in the article very briefly.
Kids here have a lot of autonomy, something that they don't appear to have in the US for instance. I'm Dutch and when I was young I'd just roam the neighborhood with friends. I didn't have a phone or tracker or anything, I was just somewhere relatively close to home, playing with other kids. Maybe at the playground of the school, maybe at the playground across the school, maybe cycling through the neighborhood like a menace on the public roads. We were obviously taught not to go with strangers and to be careful, this is not a mystery place without bad people, but that seemed to be enough.
Seeing images of the car-centric wastelands that are the average North American cities, reading about teens who still have to be driven everywhere anytime they wanna leave the house, I can totally imagine why kids would be happier here. We'd cycle to school ourselves before the end of primary school. I live close by a school now and there are plenty of kids who still do the same.
Sweden is basically a showcase of everything from soul-crushing car-centric suburbia to places very close to what you'll find in the netherlands, and i can fucking feel this difference in the air.
The nice human-friendly places have this ineffable atmosphere of calm old-timeyness, you viscerally feel more friendly when you're there. You can be in the middle of gothenburg, in some of the most densely populated areas of the entire country, and it has the vibe of a small village.
A 'Woonerf' is also a Dutch invention and used whenever possible to build new houses. That helps a lot to give younger kids safe autonomy, traffic is sparse and slow in a woonerf. My childhood shares a lot of similarities with yours, pedaling around the nearby neighborhoods looking for fun. It seems that would be a lot harder in a (more) car centric country
I love hiking nowadays but the avondvierdaagse felt like a mandatory thing when I was young. Maybe missing out on it was an even bigger motivator than participation itself back then.
Oh interesting, I loved the avondvierdaagse. Maybe because of all the candy on the last day and the medal we got haha
I might also help that the Dutch don't elect pedophiles into government.
Well there was this one time a pedophile enabling party tried to enter the National elections. They failed to get enough support though. And most of its founders got into legal trouble over possession of csam and some gl for soliciting under age sexual relations.
Their problem was they weren't rich and in control of government already. And being openly frank about pedosexual preference and not being rich led to a predictable outcome.
I still consider it to be a triumph of our electoral system when a party with ideas that flawed can attempt to join the process, however it was weird to live through that time. I'm kinda glad it happened in a time before that biggest social media platforms where there, as maybe today it could've garnered troll vote support.
A few weeks ago we joined a yearly walk of a little more than 30km around a city (Ronse, Belgium), which has been done there for almost a thousand years and my family for at least 30.
I was saying this exact thing, people here must be more healthy on average right? Doing that distance yearly, preparing, but also giving motivation for other walks must have an impact region wide!