Why Dutch children are the happiest in the world

If you asked me, a Briton raising a child in the Netherlands, to sum up the essential difference between a high-income country that UNICEF has just ranked first for child well-being and one that it has placed 24th out of 37, I would tell you this: British parents check Ofsted reports. Here in the Netherlands, we check for lice.

After every school holiday, you can find me with another volunteer - recruited from the WhatsApp group I coordinate as part of my not-so-demanding role as parent-teacher liaison for a class of 15 students at my daughter's city school in Amsterdam - combing the hair of six- and seven-year-olds with a wide-tooth comb, disinfectant spray and disposable gloves.

This collective hair-searching takes place during the first hour of the day, and the children comply with astonishing calm. At most, one or two cases of lice appear. Usually there are none. No mother or father has called the school to review the hygiene protocol. No one has suggested that it would be more appropriate to have a professional handle it. We are the parents. And we get the job done.

Contrast this with the experience of a friend of mine, whose daughter attends a private school in a highly desirable part of north London. She told me, to my surprise, that organised hair checks in Britain “don’t work” – apparently they have been phased out, seen as, depending on whom you ask, ineffective, a relic of the 1970s and an invasion of children’s physical integrity. The school, she says, is “in a constant vicious cycle of infection”. Whenever a parent raises the alarm, a letter is sent to the parents of an entire generation, solemnly confirming the “head lice case” and advising them on the best course of action. My friend says she has received more than a dozen such letters this school year. She claims she may be developing PTSD.

A national ban on mobile phones in schools is in effect from 2024. No exceptions, no negotiations. Three-quarters of high schools report better concentration since the ban was introduced. Two-thirds say the social climate has improved. When no one has a phone, no one has a better phone.

I've lived in Amsterdam for almost two decades, and that - not the constant cycling or the fact that my living room overlooks a canal - has become the most recognisable symbol of life here. At my child's school, we check each other's children for lice, collectively and for free. At my friend's daughter's school, where tuition is £19.000 a year, they send you an official letter. The Dutch, it turns out, have a gift for distributing the unglamorous work of raising children evenly and without complaint. Sometimes even with cheerfulness.

The research I mentioned is the latest UNICEF report, the Innocenti Report Card, which ranks children’s well-being across three criteria: mental health, physical health, and academic and social skills. This month, the Netherlands took first place again, prompting a now-familiar mix of admiration and self-criticism in the British press – and online.

Having spent much of the last decade observing Dutch family life from the inside, I would mildly suggest that the headlines and hasty comments largely miss the point. The Netherlands doesn't produce happy children because Dutch parents are more enlightened. It produces happy children because the system is designed so that no single parent has to be.

It all starts with something the Dutch school system doesn't have. There are no school catchment areas. In the event of an over-subscription, secondary school places are allocated by lottery. Fee-paying schooling is very rare, reserved for very specific philosophical beliefs or educational needs, and even then most of the costs will be subsidised. The Dutch royal family sends their children to state schools - a fact so inconspicuous here that it is rarely mentioned. When I told a Dutch friend that some British parents pay more than £20.000 a year in fees or move to secure a suitable state school place, he looked at me with that polite blankness that the Dutch reserve for things they can't quite believe are real.

Every day, my daughter's lunchbox - like every other student at her school - contains tap water, two fruits, and a sandwich. Fruit juice, yogurt, chocolate, crisps? No, thank you - No, thanks. The goal is to instill healthy habits in children and combat childhood obesity, but teachers will tell you that behavior has also improved. A national ban on mobile phones in schools is in effect from 2024. No exceptions, no negotiations. Three-quarters of high schools report better concentration since the ban was introduced. Two-thirds say the social climate has improved. When no one has a phone, no one has a better phone.

Depending on the distance from school, Dutch children usually start travelling to school independently around the age of six - before that they arrive on a cargo bike or perched on the back rack of their parents' bike. By the age of ten, most have taken a formal driving test, traffic exam, a state-recognized certification of independence performed on a city route in real traffic. Compare that to Britain, where driving children to school has become one of the main rituals of anxious parenting - and where, incidentally, the gap between what a good childhood looks like at the top and bottom of the income scale is much wider than here. A UNICEF report makes this connection clear: the countries where children are happiest are not those where individual parents try the hardest, but those where the gap between the best-supported child and the worst-off is the smallest.

The egalitarian logic extends to university admissions, which are largely automatic. There are no interviews, and motivation letters are not common: places are offered to anyone who meets the basic requirements. There is no Dutch Oxford, nor is there a Dutch Harvard. This famously flat country does not organize its entire higher education system around gilded peaks and dreamy spires.

It's all part of what the Dutch call Just act normal, that's crazy enough already. - literally: “just act normal, that’s crazy enough.” Most Dutch people, when asked to define their national character, will resort to that phrase. The Dutch unofficial list of offenses includes bragging, excessive spending, and similar inappropriate displays of emotional deficit. In other words, it’s a sweeping cultural ban on everything that makes Amanda Hughes—the gloriously awful antiheroine of the BBC series Motherland and its spin-off Amandaland—so irresistible to watch. Amanda couldn’t exist here. Not because Dutch women lack vanity, but because the social springboard for her exuberant neuroses was simply never built.

Children's parties are another example. By British standards, they are defiantly unobtrusive - a bunch of children in a frenzy, some waffles, maybe a climbing frame, and in the extreme case a playroom. For Sinterklaas, the national tradition of gift-giving, it is customary to agree on a spending limit in advance; what matters is the creatively wrapped gift and the witty poem, not the monetary value of what is inside.

When I was recruited to the “party committee” in our large apartment building – purely because of my seemingly fun hairstyle – and when I suggested, quite sensibly, as I thought, that we hire catering for an end-of-summer get-together instead of spending all Friday chopping fruit salad in Mirjama’s kitchen, I was literally shouted down. “civil", someone muttered - or rather bourgeois, in a specifically Dutch, pejorative sense: boring, ostentatious and narrow-minded middle-class. I fell silent and diligently chopped the fruit - and have been doing so for years.

At Christmas, when my parents kindly offered to finance a family trip to Disneyland Paris—a disastrously expensive, politically unacceptable, and hugely entertaining experience—my first thought was: no one at school can know about this. The contagion seemed to have taken hold of me completely.

It turns out that on Monday I will be taking a group of my daughter's classmates to Efteling, a quirky Dutch theme park that is said to have been one of the sources of inspiration for Walt Disney's fairy tale kingdom. All 270 or so students, the entire school, are going together in a fleet of buses. The trip is covered by an annual parental contribution of 72 euros, which is not mandatory, and from which all trips are financed throughout the year. There is no sponsored walk. There is no payment portal that closes at midnight and does not load on the phone. Just a day for everyone to enjoy together. My daughter is very excited about it. And I am, as quietly as possible, looking forward to it.

The text is taken from the Sunday Times.

Translation: NB