We love raising our kids in Denmark, but miss some things about the US

• Ellie Owens and her family moved from the US to Denmark in 2022 for her husband’s job.
• She loves that her three kids under 5 get subsidized child care and are encouraged to have autonomy.
• She said housing and food are more abundant and cheaper in the US, but she’d rather be in Denmark.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ellie Owens, 34, about her experience living in Copenhagen, Denmark, after leaving the US in 2022. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

We bought a house in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in the summer of 2021.

We had two kids and we thought, “This is it. We did it, we are settling down.” And then early 2022, we found out I was pregnant again.

Then within a week, my husband found out that his company was shutting down their office in New York, and wanted us to move to Detroit, Michigan. We had just bought a house, we were making friends in the community, we realized we had another baby coming. So we really wanted to stay where we were.

In the summer, this job in Copenhagen reached out to Shawn and asked if he’d be interested. We said, “Yeah, absolutely.”

Before we had kids, we had lived abroad in Bremen, Germany, for a year, and we tried really hard to stay there permanently but felt like we kept hitting roadblocks along the way. Ultimately we decided not to. So we had very realistic expectations of living abroad and how hard it is to get everything working and get over here.

The stars just aligned and everything worked out perfectly. It was like the universe wanted us to go.

I wanted to raise my children in Europe

When I had my first baby, Orson, and I was reading parenting books, I read this book called “There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather.” It was written by a Swedish mom who moved to the US and she talked about the differences in raising children and mindset around it, and the Nordics. I really liked it.

I liked the way she described life and bringing up children here. And it stuck with me. I definitely adopted my parenting style because of that book. I brought my kids outside all the time even before we got here. So when we found out we could actually live here and bring our kids up this way, I was like, yeah, that sounds awesome.

The work-life balance here is so much better. We’ve all been sick the last couple of weeks, and my husband has been off four days out of the last week and a half, and he’s not penalized for that. He can just take that off, no problem. So we spend more time together. 

I love how the schools treat children in Denmark

How they do schools here — it’s all play-based and there’s a big push for self-sufficiency.

They often learn to do things themselves. They dress themselves, and they all drink out of open cups — my two year old, Ansel, drinks out of an open cup and gets his own spoon out of the drawer. They’re trained in their daycare that if they can’t reach something, to go and find the stool and pull it over to help them get up. So my kids will get up into anything they want in the house because they know how to get their own stools and they pull the chairs all around. It’s funny.

And safety is much higher here. I feel safe enough to leave my kids outside when I go run into a convenience store or a bakery. Or if my baby, Dagny, wants to take a nap in the stroller, I’ll leave her outside with a monitor and I’ll sit inside and have a cup of coffee no problem.

It’s unreal. Think of all the times that you are running errands or something, and you have to do a return at a store. I remember all the time being in the car with all my kids and being like, “Oh, I’ve got to go inside and return this. I can’t leave you here. You have to come with me.” It was this big hassle. It’s so nice to not have to do that here.

And oh my gosh, the daycare is astronomically cheaper here.

Seventy-five percent is subsidized by the government. We were paying for my oldest to go three mornings a week to daycare in the US, and we were paying $2,600 a month. And here, I pay around $850 — maybe — for two children to get full-time care. They could be there from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. if I wanted them to be. And they feed them. It’s insane.

That’s the thing: it’s childcare, but it’s also high-quality childcare. I felt like in the US childcare is so expensive, but then the best ones are even more expensive, and they keep them there for shorter periods of time. How is someone supposed to work if they’re paying more money for this fancy childcare and then they don’t keep them there all day? It’s almost like a status symbol that you could go to these fancy schools.

Everything is more expensive and less convenient in Copenhagen

The convenience of life and the cost of living here is harder than in the US.

All of life’s necessities are drastically cheaper and more abundant and convenient in the US like housing, food, clothing, cars, — a lot of those things you can buy in one place. You can go to one store and buy everything you need and leave. It’s a lot harder to do that here.

Things are sold in different places and they’re much more expensive. It’s hard to go shopping, and online shopping is not as easy either. We don’t have Amazon. If you want to do Amazon, you can do Amazon Germany, but it’s more expensive to ship from there to here. So people just don’t use Amazon.

And when you get a package shipped to you, it goes to a pickup store more often than not, so you still have to leave your house to go pick it up at the convenience store down the street or something. 

Our mortgage in the US was less than the rent we’re paying here. 

If you are okay with living outside the city and commuting in, you can find a lot cheaper housing. We live in a three-bedroom apartment in the city, and we pay 22,000 Danish Krone (or about $3,122). 

Copenhagen is a city, so I do miss the convenience to get to nature. Hiking and backpacking wouldn’t compare in flat Denmark to the US. Although I love living next to the ocean — I can actually see the ocean from my apartment.

I would say no regrets. We’re very happy here in this phase of life. Obviously everybody misses their family, I see them a lot less here, but I’m happier here.