Great Danes

How do the happiest people on earth avoid meltdowns with their kids? It's all very simple, discovers Lisa Salmon

- Lisa Salmon

If you had to list what Denmark is most famous for, you might struggle to differentiate it from its Scandi neighbours. Fjords? No, that's Norway. Ikea? Nope, that's Sweden. Ice caves and steaming geysers? That's Iceland. So what does Denmark have to offer? Lego and Vikings, apparently. Which is all very well if you're an eight-year-old boy, but what about the rest of us? Well, it's also been one of the happiest countries in the world for the last half century. So why? Well, all that Lego and those vikings might actually have something to do with it, in a roundabout way: Denmark has happy children, who grow into happy adults.

Certainly that's the opinion of Jessica Joelle Alexander, a Danish parenting expert. 'It must be the parenting,' she says. 'Happy children grow up to be happy adults who raise happy children, and it is a cycle that simply repeats itself.'

She says that when she went to Denmark for the first time, she was struck by how Danish kids behaved. 'The children all seemed so serene, content, respectful and well-behaved. There was almost no yelling and parents looked genuinely joyful. The simplicity of childhood was valued and treasured in a way I had never seen before.'

Now a mother-of-two who's lived in Denmark with her Danish husband, Alexander says the way Danes raise their children changed her so much as a parent that she wanted to tell others about it. So she wrote The Danish Way Of Parenting, which has been published in more than 30 countries, and has now written a follow-up guide, The Danish Way Every Day with her friend Camilla Semlov Andersson, a Danish family therapist.