You miss the part where our children have to fight an angry cow at the age of four. That’s why I gave birth 8 times in the forest.ģ of them eventually made it home, the strong and independent ones. It’s part of our beautiful Dutch culture.
Those without any sense of direction wind up in England. You have to swim several miles back to the shore. In those areas, your parents take you out at sea and drop you there. I grew up in the western part of the country, where there are hardly any forests. We go on our bycicles and drop of our children on a canal and then they have to wait till it freezes over and then they have to skate all the way home Then I used the stars to find my way home. Being Dutch, I had made survival skills of course, so I killed a rabbit and cooked it. When I was six, my parents dropped me in the middle of nowhere. But we've made it work and I think that is beautiful. Eventually I found my way back to civilisation, but I ended up with a family I didn't know. My parents dropped me in a forest when I was 7, I lived of berries and marihuana for 3 years. Also, since cheese grows on trees here, we're never hungry. So all you have to do is walk in a straight line for 10 minutes and you'll find a house or a signpost. We have no real natural forests anymore in The Netherlands. Truth be told: it's hard to get lost here. Nobody mentioned the wolf-rite yet? There are those who think it's cruel for 4-year-olds, but luckily most of us stick to old traditions. This all happened providing I could find my way back home from the Forest in summer. My father took me to the Pier in Scheveningen, put a ball and chain on my ankle and then threw me in the freezing cold North Sea to make a real man of me. Which, I must say, was relatively easy once I'd made my way out of that cloth bag. He would row five miles out, then put me overboard to swim back by myself. On New Year's Day, my dad would take me, aged seven, out to sea in a boat. Even more fun than getting dropped in the woods in the dark by your parents, probably. Or maybe, you know, it was just the whole thing.īut either way, the clapbacks it prompted are a very fun read.
Maybe it was that last bit which riled Dutch Twitter so much. If this sounds a little crazy to you, it is because you are not Dutch.’ ‘Sometimes, they hide in the underbrush and make noises like a wild boar. To make it more difficult, adult organizers may even blindfold the children on their way to the dropping, or drive in loop-de-loops to scramble their sense of direction. ‘In some variations of the challenge, loosely based on military exercises, adults trail the teams of children, but refuse to guide them, although they may leave cryptic notes as clues. To make it more difficult, adult organizers may blindfold the children on their way to the dropping. ‘It is meant to be challenging, and they often stagger in at 2 or 3 in the morning.
‘This is the Dutch scouting tradition known as a “dropping,” in which groups of children, generally pre-teenagers, are deposited in a forest and expected to find their way back to base.
#Twitter way to the woods full#
Here’s just a little bit of the article, which you can read in full here. And so there is the custom of "droppings" - leaving kids in the forest to find their way home alone. Children are taught not to depend too much on adults adults are taught to allow children to solve their own problems. We’re grateful to for flagging this revelatory article in the New York Times which suggests Dutch parents have a habit of dumping their kids in the woods and leaving them alone to find their way home.
0 kommentar(er)
