Between Two Childhoods

I am an educator. Most of my day in India is spent with teachers, students, curriculum documents, and the dense air of classrooms. When my sister speaks about Danish kindergartens and neighborhood rituals, I find myself both enchanted and unsettled. It is easy to exoticize differences. But what interests me is the possibility of reflection. What choices have they made that we have not? What choices have we made that they have avoided? And most importantly, how do these choices shape the inner lives of children?

Around this time, I read Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Dissing Sandahl’s The Danish Way of Parenting. It is not a manual. It is a sketch of six practices that pattern many Danish families and schools: play, authenticity, reframing, empathy, no ultimatums, and togetherness. They sound ordinary until you realize how systematically they are woven into everyday life. Through my sister’s observations and my own work with Indian teachers and parents, I began to see these practices as a mirror. The mirror does not tell us to copy. It tells us to notice.

What follows is a meditation on three themes. The first is play and freedom. The second is authority and care. The third is empathy, belonging, and the courage to fail. I move between my sister’s glimpses, research evidence, and Indian educators who have long argued for a more humane pedagogy. The prose may sound like a poem because childhood itself is a kind of poem. But the footnotes are there because policy without evidence is a hymn without breath.

The Work of Play

One afternoon, my sister described a group of six-year-olds in a Copenhagen park. A boy tapped a stick against a stump to test its strength. A girl lay on her belly to watch ants ferry crumbs. Two children argued, then resolved the rules of a game they were inventing. The adult nearby did not direct, only listened for danger. It was an image of unstructured time, the kind of time that forms muscles of attention and self-regulation.

In India, play is usually treated as a reward at the end of work rather than as the work that enables learning. Yet research on outdoor learning shows that free play cultivates cooperation, risk judgment, and language growth (Skutnabb-Kangas & Heugh, 2013; Kiviranta et al., 2024). Neuroscientists have called play “the laboratory of childhood”, where the brain tests scenarios it cannot yet articulate in words. Social psychologists have documented how children who engage in more unstructured play show a higher capacity for reframing frustration and for resolving conflicts without adult arbitration.

Indian thinkers have long known this. Gijubhai Badheka’s Divaswapna reads like a field report from a teacher remaking school so that curiosity, conversation, and craft become the spine of the day (Badheka, 2006). He argued for classrooms where the child’s impulse to try, tinker, and tell stories is honored, not subdued. This is not nostalgia. It is an experiment with dignity.

Policy too echoes this wisdom. The National Education Policy 2020 calls for play-based learning in the early years and for a shift away from rote habits that flatten curiosity (GoI, 2020). It links language comfort with cognitive growth and encourages the home language as a medium in the foundational years. The 2022 National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage lays out time and materials for pretend play, exploration, stories, and local crafts (NCERT, 2022). The 2023 framework for school education extends this vision. The vocabulary is there. The question is whether schools and families will protect the time and the spaces that make this vocabulary real.

The pressure that fights play is visible in data. The Annual Status of Education Report 2024 again shows that many Indian children move through primary school without secure reading and arithmetic (ASER, 2024). The usual reaction is to add more drill. Yet the lesson could be the opposite. When learning is thin, doubling the same method rarely deepens it. Children need time to talk, build, move, test ideas with hands and peers, and then return to text and numbers with meaning in their pockets.

Indian educators have kept this flame alive in practical ways. Arvind Gupta’s long project of making science toys from everyday scrap shows what happens when the barrier between play and concept dissolves. Children pick up a straw, a bottle cap, a bit of wire, and a law of motion or a principle of pressure acquires weight and sound (Gupta, 2013). The point is not a clever hack. The point is the posture. When learning is embodied, children trust their own reasoning.

Krishna Kumar (2004) gives a language to this posture. He asks us to look past the noise of policy slogans and ask what knowledge we dignify in school. If we value only what can be measured fast, we will give children a thin diet. If we open time for debate, story, silence, observation, and handwork, we enlarge what can be learned. That move is not romantic. It is a decision about the child as a thinker.

Authority That Listens

My sister once overheard a parent on a Copenhagen street say to a child, calm but firm, “I felt worried when you ran ahead. Tell me what you were thinking.” It is a small sentence. It begins with feeling, then seeks understanding, then returns to the limit. The goal is cooperation rather than submission. This is what Alexander and Sandahl (2016) call reframing. A misstep is treated as information for the next attempt, not as proof of moral failing.

In many Indian homes, authority often arrives as command. Adults carry heavy loads, and the future feels perilous. This anxiety shows up in the way we talk to children. A forgotten notebook becomes evidence of carelessness. A poor test becomes a warning about destiny. The child hears a lesson about fear.

There is a reason to try a different route. Evidence from a large school-based health promotion trial in Bihar, the SEHER study, shows that a warmer school climate and structured socio-emotional work can improve student well-being when delivered with skill and continuity (Shinde et al., 2020). The lesson is not that one program will fix everything. It is that climate and conversation matter, and they are not luxuries.

For this, teachers need preparation and protection. Poonam Batra (2014) argued for a humane vision of teacher education in the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education. They make the case that the teacher is not a technician who implements scripts, but a professional who studies children, context, and knowledge, and takes responsibility for the social climate of the class. When teachers are treated with respect and time, classrooms inherit that dignity.

Families can practice the same spirit without new resources. The next time a child spills milk, the habit can be to pause, breathe, clean together, and ask what they noticed about the cup. The next time a teenager forgets a deadline, the habit can be to ask what pulled their attention away, then plan a scaffold. Limits remain. The change is the route by which we reach them.

Authority that listens does not abdicate. It names the boundary clearly, then teaches the skills that allow a child to respect that boundary with understanding.

Empathy as a Daily Exercise

My sister noticed that many Danish classrooms begin the day with a short meeting. Children say how they slept, what they worry about, what they hope to do. In an Indian classroom I observed in a school in New Delhi, a teacher tried a small version. She asked students to name one heavy feeling from the previous day. A boy said that his friend had mocked his handwriting. A girl said she had been scolded while she was ill. The teacher did not dispense wisdom. She asked the class what kindness might look like in response. The room grew soft, then lively. This is not therapy. This is culture building.

Indian policy already gestures in this direction. The Foundational Stage framework and NEP 2020 both speak of socio-emotional development as integral to the curriculum (GoI, 2020; NCERT, 2022). Older position papers from NCERT have long argued that values and dispositions grow through participation in cultures of cooperation, not through lectures on moral science (NCERT, 2005). The gap is not theory. The gap is time, training, and modeling.

Programs that target school climate lend support to this focus. The SEHER study did not succeed when overburdened teachers tried to deliver the entire program on top of everything else. It did better when trained counselors, embedded in the school, stewarded the work (Shinde et al., 2020). The implication is plain. If we want empathy to be routine, we must protect adults who can hold it.

There are quiet Indian rivers that feed the same sea. Nai Talim placed the dignity of labor and collective work at the heart of schooling. Krishna Kumar asked that we teach for understanding, not performance theater. Badheka centered on affection, conversation, and choice. Arvind Gupta’s toys turn the classroom into a workshop where children cooperate to take the measure of the physical world. Poonam Batra’s work insists that the teacher’s formation is a public concern, not a private errand. These are not isolated points. They map a tradition that recognizes empathy as a shared practice.

Language, Belonging and the Right to Fail

A child’s first language is not only a tool. It is a home. When we teach young children in a language they barely command, we put them on a shaky bridge and then demand a sprint. NEP 2020 and the new curriculum frameworks invite schools to begin from the language that lives in the child. This is not a retreat from excellence. It is a route toward deeper comprehension and toward self-respect. There is evidence across contexts that literacy builds faster and more securely when the early years honor the home language, then bridge outwards (Skutnabb-Kangas & Heugh, 2013). India’s diversity makes this work complex. It also makes it urgent.

Belonging is harder to legislate. In my sister’s stories, I hear of cities that make space for children to move, gather, and be seen. Public parks, safe cycling routes, libraries that feel like shared living rooms. India’s cities can move in this direction with small, stubborn steps. Safe walking routes near schools. Pocket parks that are real, not ornamental. Community libraries that are lit, stocked, and staffed. The returns are social, not only academic.

The right to fail is part of belonging. In many Indian schools, a single test can feel like a verdict on the self. Families absorb that tone. The message becomes performance or shame. A healthy system would keep pressure where it belongs, on the design of learning rather than on the identity of the learner. It would allow retry, revision, cumulative improvement. It would teach that error is data.

Screens, Surveillance, and the Texture of Time

When my sister speaks about Danish classrooms, technology barely appears. Children in the early years spend most of the day outdoors or in unhurried indoor corners. Laptops are introduced late, phones are kept out of reach. Digital learning platforms exist, but they are treated as tools to be used sparingly, not as a stage on which the entire childhood unfolds. There is little sense of a race to digitize childhood.

In India, the contrast is stark. EdTech companies push “personalized” learning to ever younger children. Schools install CCTV cameras in classrooms to “monitor” teachers. Parents, anxious about safety and performance, give children smartphones before they can tie their laces. The pandemic has deepened this normalization of screens. We have treated technology not as a tool but as a proxy for care.

Research offers a cautionary note. Large-scale evaluations of one-to-one laptop programs in the United States and Europe show mixed or even negative effects on student learning when devices are introduced without deep pedagogical change (Escueta et al., 2020). A randomized trial of a well-known Indian maths app found small gains in the short term but no sustained improvements once the intervention ended (Muralidharan et al., 2019). The message is not that technology is harmful in itself. It is that technology amplifies the existing pedagogy. When the pedagogy is thin, the amplification is also thin.

Indian thinkers have long grappled with this. Arvind Gupta (2013) built toys from trash, not because he was nostalgic for low tech, but because he wanted every child to handle materials, fail, rebuild, and understand principles from the inside out. The National Education Policy 2020 makes a similar argument in quieter prose: technology should support, not substitute, the human relationship at the heart of education (GoI, 2020).

Denmark’s approach is not anti-technology. Teenagers use devices freely outside school. But there is a civic consensus that the early years belong to unmediated experience. Nature, craft, and face-to-face interaction build a sensorium of patience and empathy before digital speed arrives. Indian cities, with their noise and crowding, cannot replicate Copenhagen’s parks. But they can borrow the insight that technology is not a shortcut to maturity. Children need time with the grain of wood, the smell of soil, the slowness of story, before they can wield screens with agency.

This comparison is not about nostalgia. It is about texture. What textures fill a child’s day. The blue glow of a tablet at dinner, or the warmth of a parent’s question. A surveillance camera in the classroom ceiling, or a teacher’s trusted gaze. The choice is ours, and it will shape not only skills but sensibilities.

Five Modest Shifts Families and Schools Can Try Now

A Closing Picture

My sister wrote recently about watching a class in Aarhus exit the school building and fan out to a small wooded patch behind the playground. No one announced an objective. A child tested the spring of a branch, another practiced hanging from a low limb, two others argued about the rules of a game of chase. The teacher walked slowly, scanning, hands in pockets, present without smothering. It looked like nothing special. It looked like a culture that trusts children to rehearse freedom in manageable doses.

I keep thinking about a different evening in my hometown in North India. A coaching center stairwell thrummed with anxiety. Parents waited in a tight line to pick up their wards. Children emerged blinking. The room smelled of markers and a stubborn kind of hope. No one was careless. Everyone was trying to do right by a future that feels hard to predict.

The contrast is real. It should not lead to self-blame or to easy praise of a faraway model. It should lead to steady revision. India has thinkers who have shown what a child-centered day can look like. Our policies name play, language, empathy, and teacher formation as essentials. Our classrooms and homes can move in that direction with small, faithful acts.

The choice is not between tenderness and achievement. It is between thin achievement and deep learning. It is between compliance and curiosity. It is between fear and attention. If we make room for children to move, to speak, to fail, to try again, we are not being indulgent. We are building the muscles that the future will demand. And we are keeping faith with an older Indian insight. A child is a person, not a project.

If my sister’s notes from Denmark have taught me anything, it is this. The culture of childhood is made ordinary. In the talk we use when a cup spills. At the minute we keep free after school. In the language we honor before we ask for another. In the pause before a shout. In the quiet presence of an adult who is close enough to help and far enough to let the child discover their own footing.

That culture is ours to make.

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