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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
How Dutch Children Continue To Be Happiest In the World
Born and raised in the Netherlands, I am always mildly amused to read headlines such as ‘Dutch Children Happiest In The World’. They pop up pretty much every year when the new annual Unicef report on child happiness gets published. I never paid much attention to such headlines, until I had a child of my own. She’s half Dutch but born and raised in London. When you then see a table like this one, with the Netherlands on top and the UK in 21st place (dropped from 16th place since 2013), it makes you think.
I started digging around and found many articles, written by non-Dutch, some of whom were raising their kids in Holland. Even back in 2007, UK papers wrote how ‘Dutch freedom and respect allow youth to flourish’. The freedom to cycle to school, sports training and friends from a young age gets quoted as a novelty. I realise how much I take for granted – and how unlikely it is that my daughter will experience that same freedom if I stay here.
In the end I read a book by Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison, an American and British expat living in the Netherlands. This article includes sections from their book and sums up some of their experiences of raising their children the Dutch way. I never realised there was such a thing as ‘the Dutch way’ – or any other ‘way’ for that matter, and I still don’t fully buy into their generalised image of Dutch children. But the book did resonate with me and parts of it made me reflect on the parental decisions we all make and the impact they have on our children’s happiness, wherever we live.
