Parenting No Kids Stuff in Norway

I have been seeing the news channels' ticker display about an Indian couple in Norway losing the custody of their two children (a three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter). Somehow in the melee of Rushdie circus at the Jaipur literary festival and India's humiliation in Australia it did not catch my attention.

Only when I read an article The Hindu (adapted from a Norwegian weekly) I was left amused and shocked. The main reasons cited for taking the kids to custody were:

• Unsuitable toys and clothes
• Insufficient room for the children to play in the house
• The three-year-old son was not having his own bed.

The other reasons were that there was no diaper-changing table at home and the child's diapers are being changed on a bed and mother slapping the elder child once.

For a moment I did feel amused and wished I were born in Norway, though would have liked to leave the country once I became a parent!

Later on I felt sorry for the Indian couple who had to face the trauma of their children being taken away to two different “ethnic” foster homes. Mind you the girl child was whisked away from her mother at the age of 5 months, when the mother was still breast feeding her. Looks like for Norwegian authorities creature comforts take precedence over emotional bonding between mother and child. Moreover I do not understand how changing diapers on a bed was hazardous.

Anyhow being a citizen of a country where cases of female infanticide, child abuse etc hardly raise any eyebrows, these standards seem too lofty. The current unfolding of sordid drama about baby Falak on TV channels makes me cringe. I shudder to think if same criterion is used to assess parents in India... even 5% of them may not pass the test (I know I am being too liberal in my estimate).

Thankfully the impasse ended with Norwegian authorities agreeing that the kids' uncle would be the “primary caregiver” till they reach the age of 18.  

But some questions do come to my mind. Reports say the father is a geo-scientist working with American firm Halliburton - and not some low-level technician. So we can safely assume that his level of general awareness was pretty good if not high. So, wasn't he aware that Norway has such crazily exacting standards of parenting? Or they thought they could get away with it?

Now there are even reports that the ‘child protection services’ is thriving racket in Scandinavian countries, with Sweden being the biggest culprit, and main beneficiaries are caregivers and other social workers, who get hefty grants from the state. They target the poor, irrespective of race, and the so called shortcomings of these parents are purely economic ones - they do not lag in love and care, but they often lose their children and get branded as having psychiatric problems by psychologists who too are part of the racket. Norway arrived at a compromise regarding the Indian couple mainly to avoid international scrutiny of this system.