In Sweden, parents get time off work to introduce their kids to school. Americans need this too

The Guardian

16-04-2025

About a month ago, I sat on a tiny wooden chair, hand-embroidering a thick cotton pillowcase in dim candlelight. Eight Swedish children softly sang a good morning song over tiny cups of peach-colored herbal tea.
This is not a tale of a tradwife textile artist living off the grid in the Swedish countryside or the opening of some eerie Midsommar-style folk horror scene. It was the first day of my three-year-old's inskolning, the introductory period to her new daycare/preschool.
Loosely translated as 'schooling in', inskolning has no real translation in English. There's no precise equivalent to it because it is not something typically practiced in the anglophone world. Inskolning refers to the period of starting daycare or preschool, usually a week or two, when parents attend preschool alongside their child in order to ease the transition; get to know the school, staff and other children; and create relationships and attachments to them. As a cultural practice – perhaps even a rite of passage, especially for parents – inskolning is not unique to Sweden; some version of it is practiced in its Nordic neighbors Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland as well.
In Sweden, it is not done simply the first time the child moves from being cared for at home to being cared for in the school setting, but every time a child starts at a new school for any reason. Parents have access to paid leave time to participate in inskolning as part of their overall 480 days of paid leave per child.
How does it work, exactly? While each preschool in Sweden is connected to the national education plan and its associated National Agency for Education, the individual schools decide how to manage the logistics, which can vary according to age, the child's prior school experiences and local staffing.
Generally, though, a first-time inskolning involves a gradual 'ramp up' of the child's independent time at school, starting with short visits and building to a full day of care. The first few days typically involve an hour or two in the late morning, allowing the children to play freely or engage in other activities with the parent close by. As the days progress, the time at school increases, and the parent might move further away or into another room. Meanwhile, the staff gradually step in to take over more of the caregiving, including meal times, toilet visits and napping.
As the child adjusts, this time of parental absence continually increases, until reaching the goal of a full day of participation in school routines without parents on-site. At this point, inskolning is considered complete. Parents, teachers and staff typically meet about a month later to discuss the family's transition to their new community.
School focuses on the child, but it's not just about the youngsters. According to Susanne, a rector (similar to a principal) of two Swedish preschools, this time period is crucial for creating relationships. 'The first time at preschool is tremendously important: it is a time when the whole family, in fact, should get to know the preschool. It is really the family's and child's first meeting with the essence of education in Sweden. One comes to us as a one-year-old, and then one continues in school all the way up to 20 years old; we think from the perspective of zero to 20 years [here].'
That was a foreign concept for me. My husband and I are Americans who moved to Sweden for jobs 10 years ago. We moved briefly back to the United States last year and enrolled our child in daycare there for the first time. We ultimately returned to Sweden, where childcare policies make for a very different life – even if it's not totally the fantasy that many Americans hold about the Scandinavian social safety net.
But contrast our daughter's first day of preschool when we lived in the US. We'd visited the school, of course. But we simply dropped her off and went to our jobs. While she happily merged into her new environment – none of the screaming or extreme separation anxiety that can be the painful worst-case scenario – we struggled those first few weeks to feel comfortable leaving her to routines and people we barely knew.
US families could benefit from their own version of inskolning, growing a 'village' of non-family caregivers. At my child's Swedish preschool, parents were asked to use the inskolning time in part to personalize the pillowcase their child would use during naptime – symbolizing the stitching into community that inskolning represents (in case you are wondering, sewing is not a usual part of the process).
As I sat among the children and caregivers who would be with my child for the better part of each working day, I came to get to know them more deeply than the few minutes at drop-off and pick-up otherwise allow. And they came to know my child, my husband and me. Our daughter was not simply a new face in the classroom but a whole person with a whole life outside school. Multiplied for each child and family, and for each preschool group and teacher, it is easy to see how quickly this very simple process builds connections between home and school worlds.
Susanne, the preschool rector (who didn't wish to use her surname), emphasized this aspect of connection: 'It is equally important to us that the adults in the family also get to know the preschool, the routines there, how things work, get to know the teachers – and also the other children – in order to create a connection to the place, the teachers and the children.'
Lindsay Baker, an American parent of two and teacher living in Sweden, agrees: her child's US daycare felt like 'a service provided so that you could go to work … It's very nice for the kids [in Sweden] to get used to the school at their own pace. Having worked in schools for my whole career, I think that all preschool-age children wherever they live would likely benefit from this model of making a secure connection between home and school.'
As Baker points out, the crucial difference is not a matter of simply a 'fast' or a 'slow' introduction to school. In the US, many Americans privately pay childcare providers directly for a service provided. In Sweden, taxpayers collectively fund a system seen as valuable to society for the secure start it provides to all children, regardless of income or background. Baker notes that best practices in US early childhood education recommend involving parents in some kind of school or home visit at the time of introducing preschool, but that such visits are not typical: 'Often preschools who offer [such visits] are the most coveted and consequently expensive ones. Here [in Sweden] every child and parent begins preschool in the same way.'
It might feel luxurious – maybe absurd – to think about implementing inskolning or other family-friendly policies in the US, when oligarchs are dismantling federal systems (including hobbling the Department of Education) at a fast clip. Not to mention that the US lacks national curricular standards for preschool education, national paid parental leave or subsidized childcare systems. That leaves families to navigate a patchwork of initiatives that create tremendous local variance even on the state level.
Yet it is perhaps this very decentralized, non-structured structure of the US childcare and preschool space that makes implementing inskolning an experiment that could be adopted by any school that wished to. Americans don't need yet another story lauding a seemingly utopian thing the Nordic countries are doing; we need small, implementable strategies to move our nation towards trust, respect for others and respect for the enormous labor involved in raising emotionally and physically healthy children.
I imagine most US childcare providers would enthusiastically embrace more involvement and connection with the families of the children in their care. But Americans are overworked and under-vacationed; they have little time to volunteer for yet another thing. Employers, in turn, would have to value this experience enough to allow workers time off to participate, let alone to participate without taking away from their accrued personal time or other paid leave time (should they even have access to such policies). Implementing this small shift would require a comparatively huge shift in the way US government and cultures think about supporting parents, valuing children and creating secure spaces for them to thrive.
Parenting in a system where society supports small children and their caregivers feels self-evident to those in Sweden, embedded in societal infrastructure and therefore impervious to criticism even from the far-right Sweden Democrats who continue to gain political support here. In contrast, parenting in even the most positive environment in the US – in my case, a family-friendly, small college town in a blue state, with a partner with a flexible work schedule – is magnitudes more difficult.
Inskolning could reduce this whiplash of difference. Americans in the US deserve the freedom to participate in their child's education without having to worry about losing money or career opportunities. They deserve robust systems of societal support for small children and the people who care for them. Such infrastructure seems incomprehensibly far from reach in this political moment, and yet never more needed to get us out of it.