Safety and freedom

There are many things I will miss about Sweden when we leave: outdoor spaces, lots of social support for families, new foods. But I recently realized what I think I might miss the very most.

I will miss not having to worry about my or my children’s physical safety.

It surprises me that this is at the top of my list. I would not say that I previously spent a lot of time thinking about safety. (I know that this is largely due to my privilege– as a white person and as a person who can afford a house in a neighborhood that does not have a lot of crime). It was only after I moved to Sweden that I realized how the threats that we experience in the United States had been a lingering source of tension. I can only imagine that the juxtaposition would be much greater for people who worry about their safety on a daily basis.

So how are things different here? I have two examples.

The first is about cars. Last year, we went to the Saab Museum, because Mark’s research focuses on auto bailouts. The Saab Museum seems mostly geared to Saab aficionados, and I admit that it was not my favorite. But one small detail in the exhibit stuck with me. They gave the statistics for the number of annual traffic fatalities in Sweden, and it seemed almost impossibly low. In 2016, there were 263 fatal road accidents across the entire country, compared to 40,200 in the United States. On a per capita basis, the United States has 4 times the number of traffic fatalities as Sweden.

Why? We spent a lot of time talking about this as we drove around Sweden. Safer cars, maybe. (There are A LOT of Volvos in Sweden!). Lower speed limits. More crosswalks. Better driver training. Strict laws about alcohol– and very strong social norms against drinking and driving. (If you go to a Swede’s house and you have a glass of wine with dinner, they are unlikely to let you drive home. Really). It turns out that the Economist wrote an article about this very topic, and they mostly agreed with us. In 1997, the Swedish government implemented a Vision Zero plan that aims to eliminate traffic fatalities altogether. And they have made a lot of progress toward that goal. Only one child under age 7 was killed in 2012 in a car accident. One!

My second example is about guns. One of the things that worries me most, especially as Simon and Anna get older, is gun safety. When Simon was a toddler (a toddler!), we started talking with him about what he should do if he saw a gun at a friend’s house. (Leave the room. Then find an adult). Simon and Anna haven’t really had a lot of playdates yet (beyond very close friends), but soon we will have the awkward conversations of asking people whether they have guns and how they are secured. I dread this. And yet we have to do it. American children are 9 times more likely to die from a gun accident than kids in other industrialized countries. In states where guns are more easily available– like North Carolina– rates of children’s deaths due to firearms accidents, homicides, and suicides are significantly higher.

In contrast, Sweden has about 1/10 as many accidental gun deaths as in the United States, and even fewer among children, even though Sweden has a relatively high gun ownership rate. This is likely because guns are very strictly regulated in Sweden. (The laws have gotten even stricter over the years, and the fatalities have gone down). Gun permits are submitted to the police. To get one, you have to pass an exam or have been a member of a shooting club for at least 6 months. You can’t just carry a gun whenever you want to; as I understand it, people can only carry a gun if they have a specific purpose, such as traveling to go hunting. Weapons and ammunition must be stored in authorized safes. They recently made the penalties for not complying with the laws even stricter.

So what does this have to do with freedom? In the United States, we hear a lot about how regulations infringe on our freedoms. Any discussion of gun control gets framed as “wanting to eliminate gun ownership in America.” Instead, we have state legislatures proposing (and sometimes passing) laws to allow guns in parks, schools, and college campuses. Even bike lanes are not immune to these critiques; an op-ed about Raleigh’s new bike lanes called them “social engineering and paternalism.”

These discussions are right, to some extent. Regulations do infringe on our freedoms. I don’t support infringing on people’s freedoms willy-nilly. But what these discussions miss is how our refusal to regulate guns or prioritize pedestrians and bikers over drivers is impinging on our freedoms.

In Sweden, I see how freeing it is to not have these worries. I’ve heard that Swedish people have a more relaxed, spontaneous approach to playdates. We haven’t experienced this yet, but Simon’s friend at school has started asking if he can just go home with him, like today. I am thankful that in addition to all of the other social norms we have to navigate in socializing with friends, I don’t have to worry about where the guns are stored.

When I walk Simon to school, there is a crosswalk (and usually a light) for every street that we cross. The cars stop for pedestrians. The main thing I have to teach Simon and Anna is how to avoid wandering into the bike lane (which is a big deal– I think the loudest expression of Swedish anger I’ve heard is a loud bike bell ringing!). It is a testament to both the drivers and the walkers that there are so few accidents, given how complicated it is to be a walker (or biker or driver) in Sweden. This is a picture of one of the streets we cross to get to Simon’s school. There are trams, cars, walkers, and bikers all sharing this street (you can’t see a tram in the picture, but you can see the tracks, at the bottom) – it is little tricky sometimes, but it works!

The freedoms that we experience in Swedish are not just intangible freedoms, although I think peace of mind is important. There are also tangible consequences that come from not having to worry as much about keeping kids safe. I see very young children (ages 7 or 8) walking to school or riding the tram. (The tram has an official rule about this – you have to be at least 7!). Kids can make spontaneous play dates and run in and out of each others houses and the parents don’t have to worry. If I ever left my house after 8 pm (which I don’t, not in the US or in Sweden!), I could walk down the dark streets by myself without worrying. You can drive home on Sweden’s most raucous night (Midsummer’s eve) and not be too concerned about drunk drivers.

It is going to be hard to leave all of this behind. It is liberating for my children, for me as an individual, and for me as a parent. For all of our talk in the United States about the “good old days,” when children could run and play freely, we do almost nothing to protect their right to do that. Yes, we would have to give up some freedoms. But we would gain all of these new freedoms in return. As someone wisely pointed in a recent discussion about this topic, it would be great if everyone in the United States (and everywhere) could have the chance to experience life free from the threat of gun violence (and other forms of violence) and then decide if they wanted to go back to the old way. I don’t think many people would.

The art and politics of Swedish laundry.

I have been waiting for this to happen since I arrived in Sweden. It took three months, but it happened: I messed up my laundry reservation.

This requires a bit of explaining. The Swedish laundry system is complicated. They do not have laundromats. I was shocked to find out that they don’t exist, except in campgrounds (pro tip if you are stranded in Sweden – wash your clothes at a campground!). Last year, in Stockholm, we started googling after being there for a week and realizing that our children’s clothes were covered in playground dust and food. But no– there were no any laundromats anywhere near us (even in the largest city in Sweden), because every apartment building has a washer and dryer in the basement.

Back to the reservations. In our apartment building, we have the old-fashioned system: a board with slots for every day of the month. There are three slots per day, from 8 am – 12 pm, 12 pm – 4 pm, and 4 pm – 8 pm. You use your key to move your number to the slot you want. If you don’t need a laundry time (which I cannot imagine happening unless you were going on an extended vacation), you move your number into the “parking” area.

Anyway, last week I had in my head that I had reserved Tuesday evening. We plotted out our entire night with this assumption in mind, because we knew we would have to be home and ready to do laundry starting at 4 pm. (I can totally imagine someone turning down a date or exciting social engagement because they had to do laundry!). But when I went downstairs with my basket of clothes on Tuesday at 4 pm, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. I had reserved Monday afternoon. Someone else was doing their laundry, and there weren’t any slots available for three more days.

We briefly began to freak out a bit. Mark was going to Stockholm in two days, and wasn’t sure he had anything to wear. We were running out of clean sheets and pajamas– and pants, for that matter, for the kids (Swedish daycares encourage playing in the dirt, which I support, but, you know… it’s messy). But there was nothing to be done about it. I even told Mark he should just go buy another pair of pants, if he was really desperate! (He figured something out though).

This is the intriguing and somewhat terrifying thing (to an American, at least) about the Swedish laundry system: if you mess up, or it’s just not working for you, there’s really no other option. An acquaintance said that her kid went to school in dirty clothes for a week because she messed up her laundry times and no one was willing to switch. When we stayed with a bunch of other families in a cabin in central Sweden this summer, we left behind a huge pile of sheets and blankets. The friend that invited us said that the owners of the cabin would be doing laundry for weeks, because they could still only get one slot per week. There are virtually no laundromats in Sweden, and as far as I can tell, there are no services that will take your laundry and bring it back washed for a fee.

Once you get your slot figured out (which, I will say, is not that hard – I have managed every week for three months now, with this one exception), the Swedish laundry system is pretty great. Everything is made by Electrolux, which is a Swedish company – I didn’t know! In our basement, we have two washers that are surprisingly good at getting out playground grime, one dryer, and the most impressive laundry-room item of all… the drying cabinets. I had never seen these before I moved here, but they are basically wardrobes with a ton of poles that you can hang things on, and they are heated. It is like hanging your clothes on a clothesline, but it dries everything much faster. (Additional fun fact: Both Simon’s and Anna’s schools have these for every single classroom – for the outdoor clothes, of course!). It is all free.

I kind of love this way of doing laundry. When your four-hour window is here, it’s intense– I feel like I spend the entire time running up and down the stairs, loading and unloading washers and dryers and drying cabinets. This is especially exhausting because we live on the fourth floor. I climb a lot of floors on laundry day – like 30 flights of stairs! But when it’s done, you don’t have to think about it for at least another week, and all of your clothes are washed.

However, when you’re stuck– whether it’s because you messed up your laundry time, or you had guests and have a lot of extra sheets, or your kids threw up all over everything (this hasn’t happened yet, but I imagine it could happen)– you’re kind of stuck. And this is kind of a metaphor for what I’ve observed about Swedish life so far. The level of services and support that are available to people is much better than we have in the US. Childcare. Parental leave. School lunch. Laundry. But you can’t buy your way out of it. (Or sometimes you can – but it’s not as easy and it’s sometimes impossible). There. is. no. laundromat. (You can buy a washer and dryer, but that’s not an option for most renters). For an American, this is very noticeable and somewhat shocking, because we are so used to this being an option, whether we can afford it or not. There are a ton of services available to help us buy our way out– and a recent study (which annoyed me) even suggested that this was the key to happiness. Maybe some of those services are available in Sweden, but they are noticeably less visible, and they seem to be less available.

This should not be surprising. This is the other side of a more equal society. We all have to do our share, and there’s no getting out of it. Somehow, I didn’t imagine that this would all play out in the laundry room– but it did.

Parenting in a strange place

We found out 2 days ago that tonight was Simon’s “back to school” night – we must have missed the earlier announcements. We rush the kids through dinner and arrive just in time. Immediately we have to decide what to do with our shoes. Although I am now used to the idea that for Swedish people, wearing shoes inside is basically like rolling around in dirt on the floor, I still find it hard to know what to do in some situations. There are no other shoes piled up inside the door. Where are they? We take off our shoes and line them up along the hall, then follow the other parents downstairs to the gym.

There is literally not a single child in the crowded room. Mark decides to go back upstairs to see if the kids are playing somewhere. In the meantime, Simon and Anna and I sit down in the front. I introduce myself to the woman next to me, the mother of a girl in Simon’s class. She is from Uganda and she has been here 2 years. “Do you like Sweden?” I ask her. “I like Sweden very much,” she says, “because it is so good for my children. But for me– I am a grown woman, and I have to learn Swedish.” She uses a Swedish word that I don’t understand to describe the process of learning Swedish. I am pretty sure it means “almost impossible.” “But I have to do it,” she concludes. I tell her that I agree that Swedish is very hard. She repeats that she really likes living here, though. Except for the weather.

Mark returns. There are no kids anywhere in the building, it seems. I give Simon and Anna the books I have stashed in my purse. We tell them to settle in and try to be quiet. “I know you know how to behave!” I whisper, but I am skeptical. Where are the other kids? A lot of parents seem to have come by themselves, instead of in pairs, like us. Maybe they have left the other parent with the children. I am thinking about how exactly one year ago, when we went to Simon’s first back to school night, they told us that we shouldn’t bring our children. Only one family– a family from Mexico, who didn’t speak a lot of English– brought their children. I remember wondering whether it was because they didn’t get the message or because they couldn’t find a babysitter. Maybe they wanted to come together, in the hopes that between the two of them, they might be able to piece together the meaning of what was being said. Maybe it was all three, as it was for us.

The principal comes to the front and begins talking. She talks fast and is not completely speaking into the microphone. If I had a chance of understanding even a little, it is gone. I stare intently at her but understand almost nothing. Mark translates a few things. I look around at the teachers and the other parents. The parents are almost even in terms of men and women, which is striking. Anna starts to squirm and whine. I feel embarrassed, because we are at the very front and Sweden is one of the quietest places I know. “It’s almost over!” we say.

The speeches are over. I think the principal has told us to go to our children’s classrooms, but I’m not sure. We look at the father of one of Simon’s classmates. “We’re going upstairs to the classrooms,” he confirms. He gives us a synopsis of all of the points during the speech, looking at notes on his phone. Some seem important, some less so. The website hasn’t been updated. There is a school social worker who works twice a week. There are going to be changes in the school assignment plans next year. I didn’t understand almost any of this.

We file up the stairs and go down the hall to Simon’s classroom. Thankfully, Simon and Anna are allowed to play with Legos while we listen to a second presentation. His teacher greets us. “Here is coffee and tea,” she tells us, “and then we’ll have the presentation in the other room. Lars [another teacher] is going to translate for you.”

I get my tea. They are already making a second pot of coffee. I am amazed by how much coffee Swedish people drink and by how they never seem concerned about consuming caffeine late at night.

We go into the adjacent room for the presentation. We cluster with the other non-native Swedish speaker so that the translator can speak to all of us. I notice the letters on the board and the folders and cubbies of the kids’ work. There are paintings and self-portraits in the other room. “They are doing something here,” I whisper to Mark. Every day, I ask Simon what he did at school. Every day, he tells me “he forgot.” I have literally been wondering if he has learned a single thing at school. I am still not sure. I am confident that we made the right decision in sending him to a Swedish school, but sometimes I doubt myself.

The teachers begin talking. The translator whispers in my ear. It is helpful, but also sort of embarrassing. I feel self-conscious that he is being too loud and that all of the other parents are annoyed. I remember when we did this type of translation at a workshop that I ran, and some of the people didn’t realize it was a translator and thought that people were just whispering to each other. I feel guilty for requiring a translator and sucking up all of the resources. We’re only staying here a year.

The teachers explain their approach to managing behavior, the way they organize the day, and some logistical details. With the translator’s help, we understand a lot of what they say, but there are a lot of details that we don’t understand. The kids are supposed to bring an item that starts with the “letter of the week” every Friday, but we don’t understand how to figure out the letter. The teachers explain that soon they will stop sending us paper newsletters and instead communicate via an online system. Some parents are having a hard time logging in. I have no idea how to even go about accessing this system. There are two “room parents” (one dad and one mom). I didn’t even know there were parent-volunteers, not that I would make a good volunteer, since I can’t communicate with most of the kids.

The teacher asks if there are any questions. A mom raises her hand. I think she says something about wanting the other parents to introduce themselves. The teacher nods, then looks at Mark to go first. He laughs and looks at the translator. “They want you to say who your child is,” says the translator. Mark says his name and that our child is Simon. I chime in that my name is Sarah. Our fellow-English speaker goes next, but introduces herself in Swedish: Jag heter… Jag är Felix’s mamma.” These are sentences that I actually do know how to say in Swedish. “If we hadn’t gone first, we could have done that!” Mark whispers. I feel embarrassed again. We have managed to be the ignorant Americans, refusing to even try to speak another language.

I have to leave for my Swedish class. I skipped the first hour to come to this meeting, but I don’t want to miss the whole thing, so I thank the translator, slip out of the room, and walk down the hill to my class.

—

As experiences of moving to a new country go, I am aware that mine is about as easy as it gets. Almost everyone here– cashiers in stores, waiters and waitresses, people in the train stations– slips into English without even being asked. At work, I give my talks and attend meetings in English. We are only staying a year. Unlike the other students in my Swedish class, who are learning Swedish so that they can get a job here, if I don’t learn to speak Swedish, I will still have a job. While this year might be difficult at times for my children, they will return to the United States, where lots of people will speak their language. We live in an apartment building filled with families from all over the world, and they have two kids they love to play with (one from Brazil, one from China) on the floor below us.

We are not real immigrants. But my experiences– of worrying for my children, wondering what they are doing in school, and feeling like I am not understanding half of what’s going on– help me empathize with all of the immigrant parents out there.

I have tried to be extra friendly toward immigrants ever since I moved to rural Mexico in 2004 and didn’t have any friends. I didn’t speak Spanish very well, and it was lonely and isolating for a long time. I still remember and am grateful to the people who reached out to me, many in very small ways. I have tried to do the same for others since then, but I am sure that I have failed many times. When I go back to the US, I am vowing to do better.

Lessons from the other side of the lectern

I’m back on the student side of the classroom for the first time in a while. I’m enrolled in a free Swedish class that the university offers visiting researchers, post-docs, and non-native permanent faculty and staff. In my class, there are people from each of those categories: most are post-docs who will be here for at least two years, maybe longer; a few are faculty who (I’m told) have to pass a certain level of Swedish proficiency to be granted tenure; and then me, a visiting researcher here for one year. The vast majority are post-docs. (If you’re paying close attention, you’ll have noticed that there are faculty, who teach, with permanent positions but who do not speak Swedish. That’s how high a level of English the Swedish population–especially the university population–has.)

It’s been even longer since I studied a new language. I took Spanish for a year in high school. I took it again my first year of undergraduate, went to Germany for a semester and started studying German there. I kept studying German for the next 3 years or so, including from the Goethe Institut while on a Rotary fellowship in Germany  for a year. During grad school, I spent time in Spain and went back to studying a bit of Spanish. And that’s been it, until now. I like learning languages, so I’m doing this mostly for fun. There are lots of other reasons: to see if my brain is still squishy enough to absorb new information; to show respect for my host country, Sweden; and to set an example for Simon and Anna, who are slogging through school days in Swedish with no language training.

I may have more to say about Swedish at another time. Right now I can say that it sounds a bit like a mash-up of English and German and that my confidence in how much I’ll learn waxes and wanes. But after a couple of classes, what’s been on my mind are the reflections that the experience has prompted about being a teacher and being a student. There are two that I wanted to share here.

1) Having learned is often more fun than learning. It’s mildly exhilarating to get through an interaction without having to switch to English, even if that interaction is: “hello; yes, I found what I needed; no I don’t need the receipt; goodbye.”  In contrast, writing asinine sentences about Olle and Torbjörn enjoying Thai food during study breaks? Less exhilarating. Realizing that Swedish doesn’t require conjugating verbs (I do, she does, etc.), energizing. Realizing that there are roughly seventeen categories of noun declensions (a girl, the girl, girls, the girls = en flicka, flickan, flickorna, ….), that the patterns depend on whether the word is an “en” word (en flicka, 80%) or an “ett” word (ett äpple), and that are plenty of irregular ones, deflating. As a student, I just have to realize this. When my classmates ask, a bit naively, whether there are any exceptions to a given rule of thumb, I’m surprised and empathetic at the same time. In the midst of something complex, we love to find something solid that we can grab onto.

As a student, I simply have to remember that and prepare myself for it. Celebrating small successes is an important coping mechanism, it seems to me. As a teacher, I have to remember how frustrating it can be. Maybe I can create those pieces of terra firma that students can latch onto. Or at least I have to remember this when they grab onto seemingly insignificant facts; like my Swedish language classmates and I, they’re drowning in complex information and just want something to hold onto. It’s a small victory. The key on both sides is to move beyond those simple points and onto the more complex questions and topics we’re tasked with understanding.

 

A second point was on my mind after a lackluster class: teaching and learning isn’t a contractual relationship; it’s a convention. Here’s a simple truth that we all know: from time to time, the teacher phones it in. Or isn’t prepared. Or is sick. Or is going through a personal crisis. Or, or, or. But when you’ve done it yourself, it’s painfully, shift-in-your-seat awkwardly clear when it’s happening in front of you. Recently, I considered leaving when it was happening. I thought about the bedtime stories with my kids I was missing. I thought about the Rosetta Stone software I could be using instead. Instead, I flipped through Swedish vocabulary flashcards on my Quizlet app while the teacher spent an obvious amount of time walking a class of highly educated people through how to use an on-line dictionary. And this after having started 15 minutes late because the technology wasn’t working, which probably meant the teacher hadn’t shown up on time to get organized. I knew it because I’d been there. That didn’t make it any more fun. It annoyed me.

As I walked home, however, I thought through the experience. Once we finally moved on, the balance of the scale shifted. I realized I didn’t have my textbook or workbook; I had to borrow one. And I hadn’t done the worksheets for that week. I stared intensely at my desk when the teacher asked questions, making it impossible to be called on because I know the teacher doesn’t know our names (again, been there). So who failed whom that night? The simple answer is that both sides failed. Who’s to blame? Both sides are.

This mutual responsibility is what gets lost in the slow-rolling, mumble-fest that circles around who’s lazier: college students or the professors tasked with teaching them. The former argue that professors are out of date, are hard to reach, ask too much of them, and don’t respect the fact that they (read: someone) is paying them–paying them!!–to give them a diploma, the value of which is tied directly to the paycheck of the job it gains the student who holds it. Professors reply that the students are paying a very small part of the cost of faculty time and that they’re ultimately paying for the chance to earn an education, which is different than receiving a diploma. Students mumble that professors give the same lectures semester after semester; professors grouse that students work less and less, semester after semester.

As my autobiographical case study shows, both sides have reasonable points. But the focus of that debate is off target, in my opinion. Going forward, I’ll explain it to students using an important principle of international law. Back in the good old days when we thought being labelled a horrible president required starting an unjustifiable war, building up the foundations of a global economic crisis, expanding the surveillance of citizens in the name of counter-terrorism, and demonizing Muslims and Arabs in the name of the same, we debated George W. Bush’s endorsement of torture. For International Relations scholars, an important point was that the US was a signatory to the Geneva Convention, which pretty clearly prohibited the kind of torture that the Bush administration was carrying out. For critics, including friends who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, that argument seemed like the worse kind of academic theorizing. Surely the people we were fighting in various places around the world wouldn’t hesitate to torture Americans, given the chance. Why shouldn’t we do the same?

There are lots of reasons–moral and strategic–to resist the temptation. But one argument is that the agreement prohibiting torture was a convention, not a treaty. Conventions are binding regardless of the actions of the other parties. If all other states party to the convention engage in torture, you as a signatory are still legally bound to reject torture. Treaties, on the other hand, are contracts, and contracts are only valid as long as both sides adhere to the rules that they themselves have endorsed. Trade deals are treaties, as are arms control agreements. If one side breaks their promise, the others are relieved from their obligations. That contingent character is their primary means of enforcement. Conventions, however, which are rarer because they are so binding, don’t work that way. Their force is a function of their moral authority.

The teacher-student relationship is a convention, not a treaty. If one side breaks it, the other parties remain obligated to fulfill their commitments. If the professor phones it in, the student still has to to learn the material, because it’s part of your education. And that learning that material is what a bunch of experts have said is what it means to be educated. When students aren’t prepared for class or don’t do the work for the paper assignment, teachers don’t get to quit teaching. In both cases, the parties to the convention may have to adopt alternative strategies to reach their desired ends. But neither side is relieved from their obligations when the other party fails to meet theirs.

Guest post by Anna – How my school in Sweden is different

Here is Anna’s guest post on how her Swedish school is different from her school in North Carolina! She is excited to write her first blog post and excited that “people all over the world” can read it.

Difference #1: They let me have a knife and a fork, and I get my own food by myself. (Sarah addition: This deserves a blog post of its own! I went to lunch with Anna on her first day, and was amazed to see the preschoolers passing dishes around the table. They even gave the 16-month old a knife!).

Difference #2: The little kids are in my same class. In North Carolina, the other kids were 4, like me.

Difference #3: They have different swings. We call one swing “the pizza swing.”

[Sarah note: Here is an actual picture of the “pizza swing” – they are everywhere and they are awesome!]

Difference #4: We go on hikes. (Sarah note: Her school is right next to a forest. One her first day, Anna mentioned that she thought it would be fun to go on a hike. The next day, all of the kids and teachers took a long walk up the hill next to her school!).