Michele Hutchison and Rina Mae Acosta – The Happiest Kids in the World (s3ep13)

Summary:

An interview with the authors of “The Happiest Kids in the World”. Rina Mae Acostais a writer from California currently living in the Netherlands with her Dutch husband and two young sons. She founded the successful parenting blogFinding Dutchland. Michele Hutchison worked in publishing in Britain before moving to Amsterdam in 2004. She is now a prominent translator of Dutch literature and lives in a traditional Dutch house with her husband and two children.


Imagine a place where young children play unsupervised, are well behaved, and don’t spend hours cooped up inside doing homework. A place where babies sleep 15 hours a day, teenagers rebel only minimally, and parents enjoy an enviable work-life balance. Now imagine that those children rank #1 worldwide in both happiness and in education according to UNICEF. This place is not a fantasy –it’s the Netherlands. In The Happiest Kids in the World: How Dutch Parents Help Their Kids (and Themselves) by Doing Less (The Experiment; April 4, 2017; paperback; $15.95; ISBN: 978-1-61519-390-5), Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison –an American and a Brit,respectively, both married to Dutch men and raising children in the Netherlands–give the lowdown on the unique environment that enables the Dutch to turn out such well-adjusted, happy, and independent children.