If you looked at my Danish husband’s social media, you wouldn’t know he is a parent.
There are no monthly updates about our 3-year-old son, Aksel, no sentimental captions about milestones, and no proof that he is involved in family life.
The truth is, he is an incredible father. He just doesn’t feel the need to narrate it.
When I moved from the US to Denmark eight years ago for love, I barely noticed that difference. But after becoming a mother in Copenhagen, I started to see how much of the parenting culture I had absorbed in America was about proof: proof I was trying hard enough, sacrificing enough, and doing enough.
In Denmark, parenting feels less curated and less dependent on public approval. While that does not mean love is absent or less intense, it feels different from the constant social media comparisons around motherhood that seem to dominate my American social media feed.
The longer I parent here, the more I realize that becoming a “good parent,” at least for me, has meant unlearning instincts I did not even know I had absorbed: the urge to manage, document, and enrich every aspect of my child’s life.
Fatherhood looks different here
Before having Aksel, I, of course, believed in gender equality. However, motherhood taught me how swiftly those ideals can collapse after having a baby, especially for women raised in cultures where maternal love seems measured by the burdens they shoulder without complaint (American trends, such as TikTok tradwives, exacerbate this).
Denmark challenged what I had accepted as normal because, here, fathers aren’t usually applauded for the bare minimum. In many Danish families, including my own, dads are expected to be full parents, not assistants to motherhood.
Denmark’s parental leave system reflects that expectation, too. Under the latest parental leave model, rolled out in October 2022, leave is divided more evenly between genders, with each parent receiving a portion that cannot be transferred to the other. All over Copenhagen, you’ll see dads pushing strollers, coffees in hand, often walking with other fathers on leave. This isn’t a novelty; it’s just parenting.
That makes shared caregiving more explicit than the model I grew up with in the US. My mother, an elementary school teacher, had two weeks off after I was born. My father, a teacher at the same school, had none.
Not every Danish family lives in perfect equality. But the baseline feels different when fathers are treated as parents from the beginning. In the US, I often saw motherhood framed as self-erasure. The mother who anticipates and sacrifices everything is often treated as a “good parent,” as if being indispensable is the same thing as being loving.
This was one of the first things I had to unlearn.
I had to stop optimizing childhood
Childhood is imagined differently here, too. I grew up in Connecticut, where achievement started early — so early that I told my parents I wanted to go to Harvard when I was 6. That sounds absurd now, but I’m a product of a high-achieving environment where competition could begin in kindergarten.
Living here, that pressure seems especially stark. Danish early childhood education emphasizes play, independence, outdoor time, and social development over grades, creating room for children to grow before measurement takes over.
This has been confronting for me. I did not realize how much of my own parenting vocabulary was built around expressions like “enrich,” “prepare,” “stimulate,” and “schedule.”
In Denmark, unstructured time is not considered wasted time, and boredom is not seen as a parental failure. That has required more unlearning than I expected. I had to question the instinct that told me a good mother should always be offering more.
I am unlearning control
One of the hardest lessons to overcome is my need to constantly suggest the activity, frame the lesson, or reassure myself that I am doing enough. But I am starting to see that some of what I called “attentiveness” was really control, and some of what I called “involvement” was really anxiety.
Living in Denmark has shown me that sometimes love looks less like hovering and more like trusting your child to explore, be bored, and take small risks.
I do not think Danish parents love their children more, or that Denmark has solved modern family life. I also do not think American parents are wrong to be more anxious. In the US, there are legitimate reasons parents feel they have to optimize everything: less structural support, less affordable childcare, and more competition.
But raising Aksel here has forced me to see how much of what I once considered “good parenting” was conditioned by an American fear of falling behind.
That instinct is still in me, and maybe it always will be. But I notice it more quickly now, and I don’t let it become consuming.
And maybe that is the part of “good parenting” I most needed to unlearn: the idea that love has to look like constant effort to count.
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