Friluftsliv (open-air life) as a cultural site of emotion socialization in early childhood in Norway

1 Introduction

Children's emotional development pertains to early ontogenetic changes which transform the functionality, organization, and complexity of different dimensions of emotion (Buss et al., 2019), including emotional competence, often conceptualized as individual capacities, in recognizing, expressing, understanding, and regulating emotions (Denham et al., 2015). The concept of emotion socialization, on the other hand, draws attention to the actors, social values, practices, and contextual conditions that orient children's emotional development (Cole and Tan, 2015; Denham et al., 2015). Since emotional capacities develop and become visible in social contexts, advancing emotion research in early childhood requires richer accounts of the diverse, culturally meaningful practices through which emotional development unfolds. This requires attention to social relations, geographical milieus, and culturally relevant practices that evoke emotions and provide the settings in which children learn and enact emotional competence. It also requires looking beyond conventional indoor contexts, transcending individual internal states, and analyzing critically how emotional competence is understood and enacted in specific contexts. Outdoor environments offer one important context for this broader inquiry, and are particularly relevant in Norway, where 94.5% of children aged one to five attend kindergarten (Statistics Norway, 2026). Children in Norwegian kindergartens (barnehager) often spend substantial time outdoors throughout the year, engaging in exploration, play, and shared activities in natural environments (Lysklett and Berger, 2017; Sandseter and Lysklett, 2017). The Norwegian Framework Plan for Kindergartens states that children should enjoy outdoor experiences throughout the year, develop a sense of connectedness with nature, and experience wellbeing, joy, and achievement through physical activity (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2017). These policy expectations present outdoor activity as beneficial to children's development but also indicate culturally valued orientations toward nature, bodily challenge, and participation with others. Together, these outdoor practices and policy expectations reflect friluftsliv, a culturally embedded tradition and philosophy of outdoor life that serves as a cultural and conceptual foundation for the arguments developed in this paper.

2 Emotions in cultural practices

The study of emotions within the field of psychology has long been shaped by debates between biological-evolutionary and constructivist perspectives. Earlier theories often focused on a limited set of universal emotions, whereas more recent work emphasizes how culture shapes emotional experience, expression, and meaning (e.g., Keltner et al., 2019; Lindquist et al., 2022). To varying degrees, many contemporary approaches view emotions as processes that emerge through social interaction and culturally meaningful environments (Mesquita, 2022). This shift has important implications for developmental psychology. That is, if emotions are embedded in social practices, emotional competence cannot be understood solely as an internal capacity. Instead, it can also be understood as the ability to participate in culturally organized situations in ways that align with socially valued expectations (Cole and Tan, 2015).

Culturally relevant practices, such as rituals, social narratives, and everyday routines, often evolve in ways that make them particularly effective at evoking certain types of emotions. According to Fiske (2022) and Fiske et al. (2025), practices that reliably evoke valued emotional experiences are more likely to be repeated, shared, and transmitted. Through this process, they can become stabilized elements of cultural life. The concept of emotion niche captures this process: repeated practices form configurations of relationships and meanings that evoke certain emotions while also providing criteria for evaluating which emotions are appropriate and valued in a given context (Fiske, 2022).

Relational models theory offers support in explaining how the relationships organized within such practices can evoke specific emotions (Fiske, 1991). In particular, communal sharing relations are characterized by a sense of unity, belonging, and mutual care. For instance, a sudden intensification of communal sharing often elicits kama muta, a positively perceived social relational emotion commonly experienced as being moved or touched (Fiske et al., 2025). Practices that intensify communal sharing consequently evoke emotional experiences that people want to repeat and share. By repeatedly evoking such experiences, emotion niches help stabilize expectations about what emotions are appropriate and valued, thereby influencing what it means to be emotionally competent.

As such, we propose that emotion niches as recurring practices, relationships, and meanings, which make certain emotional experiences more likely and more highly valued (Fiske, 2022), orient ideals of emotion socialization and provide culturally organized situations that supply emotional development. Emotion niches also make socially valued forms of emotion more salient, which is important information for children to enhance their emotional competence (Cole and Tan, 2015). Therefore, we argue that friluftsliv, as practiced in Norwegian early childhood institutions, can function as an institutional emotion niche.

3 Friluftsliv as an institutional emotion niche

Friluftsliv can be roughly translated as “open-air life” and is considered an important ethos of Norwegian cultural heritage. It emerged as a named tradition in the 19^**th** century, with mixed origins in bourgeois exploration, rural harvesting traditions, and changing ideas about nature and national identity (Gurholt, 2008). Traditional accounts of friluftsliv often emphasize simplicity, connection with nature, and ideas associated with deep ecology (Næss, 2005). It is also a socially complex phenomenon shaped by historically situated ideas about nature, gender, class, and education (Beames and Eriksen, 2026; Gurholt, 2008). For instance, activities such as cross-country skiing carry symbolic meanings that connect particular outdoor practices and identities with ideas of Norwegianness. Such associations have historically been shaped by white, urban, and middle-class practices and values (Andersson, 2008; Broch, 2022), suggesting that friluftsliv is not a culturally neutral practice.

Friluftsliv also occupies a central place in Norwegian early childhood education and care (ECEC), where it is predominantly perceived as a beneficial pedagogical resource for promoting children's development, wellbeing and learning (usually applies to children ages 1–5). Kindergarten educators tend to regularly organize outdoor activities in diverse weather conditions, including forest excursions, free play in nature, and shared routines such as eating outdoors or gathering around a fire (Neegaard, 2022; Nilsen, 2008). These practices are often physical or recreational, while simultaneously being embedded in broader cultural ideals of simplicity, resilience, closeness to nature, and collective experience. As such, friluftsliv in kindergartens provides a social setting in which particular emotional experiences and ways of relating to others and nature become valued.

To illustrate how these processes can unfold, consider a common outdoor excursion in a Norwegian kindergarten. When children prepare to go outside in cold or wet weather, many children are excited, while others may be hesitant. As the group enters the forest, educators tend to frame situations as manageable and meaningful by emphasizing exploration, cooperation, and shared enjoyment. When children encounter physical challenges, such as slippery ground or cold hands, educators may normalize the discomfort as temporary while encouraging persistence and mutual assistance.

Through these interactions, children are not only supported in handling the immediate situation but also guided toward culturally valued ways of understanding and responding to bodily and emotional experiences. Over time, repeated participation can contribute to emotional orientations associated with friluftsliv, such as endurance, calmness, mastery, enjoyment of outdoor activity and nature, and collective engagement. Rather than being taught as abstract rules, these orientations emerge through recurring practices in which particular emotional responses are expected, recognized, and affirmed. Thus, from the perspective of emotion socialization, kindergarten educators play a central role in organizing these emotional experiences. Through framing, modeling, encouragement, and responses to children's emotional expressions, educators express emotions and reactions associated with outdoor practices and communicate values and goals attached to them (Denham et al., 2015).

Participation in friluftsliv can also be a foundation for meaningful shared experiences that foster belonging and togetherness. Moving together through difficult terrain, helping other children overcome challenges, or gathering around a fire can function as micro-events of intensified communal sharing and evoke emotions associated with increased social closeness and belonging, such as kama muta. Experiences of shared endurance, mutual support, and collective accomplishment can consequently strengthen children's connections with one another, with nature, and with the cultural practice of friluftsliv itself. Although kindergarten settings are the main focus of this paper, it is worth highlighting that the institutional importance of friluftsliv also extends to school settings. In the first 2 years of school, for instance, the Norwegian physical education curriculum emphasizes play and interaction in varied movement environments and exploration of local nature through different activities across seasons (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2020), and school practices often include regular outdoor excursions. While school-specific routines and expectations (which usually apply to children ages 6–13) may sustain or transform the emotion niche, teachers' framing, peer relations, and institutional recognition continue to shape emotion socialization.

Taken together, we propose that friluftsliv in Norwegian kindergartens as well as schools can be understood as an institutional emotion niche because it provides an institutionally organized configuration of recurring practices, relationships, and meanings through which particular emotional experiences and competencies become more likely and more highly valued. However, as Broch (2020) illustrates, such emotional experiences are not automatic. Similar situations may evoke enthusiasm and mastery for some children but discomfort, insecurity, or irritation for others, depending on weather conditions, prior experience, perceived competence, and relational dynamics. Moreover, participation may presuppose particular skills, equipment, and forms of cultural familiarity (Andersson, 2008; Broch, 2020). Practices of friluftsliv may therefore facilitate belonging and inclusion while potentially also producing experiences of exclusion. Thus, understanding friluftsliv as an institutional emotion niche requires attention not only to the emotions it promotes but also to whose emotional responses and ways of participating are recognized as competent.

4 The inclusion–exclusion paradox

Although friluftsliv can provide children with experiences of mastery, shared enjoyment, and belonging, its institutionalization creates a potential inclusion–exclusion paradox. The Norwegian Framework Plan commits kindergartens to equity, diversity, and responsiveness to children's cultural and individual circumstances. Simultaneously, it presents outdoor participation as a context for wellbeing, joy, and achievement and requires kindergartens to support children in coping with adversity, tackling challenges, and developing a positive emotional connection with nature (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2017). These mandates are not necessarily contradictory, but tensions can arise because inclusion is pursued through a culturally patterned practice whose signs of successful emotional participation are not neutral. Meaning, while many children may eagerly engage in physically demanding outdoor play, interpret environmental challenges as enjoyable and find possibilities for mastery, others could express discomfort and withdraw. These differences often originate from children's differing familiarity with and access to friluftsliv.

Enjoyable participation in friluftsliv depends, for instance, on suitable clothing and equipment, mobility, and access to particular locations, which is not equally available to everyone (Beames and Eriksen, 2026). Also in kindergartens, children enter with different experiences associated with family routines, material resources, disability or sensory needs, and familiarity with other climates and landscapes. Importantly, no particular cultural or family background determines how a child will respond. Instead, children's emotional responses emerge relationally, at the intersection of their embodied histories, the immediate environment, social relationships, and institutional expectations. Consequently, opportunities to acquire and display the forms of emotional competence recognized within friluftsliv can be unevenly available to children, despite formal access to outdoor activities being equal. When such differences remain underarticulated among educators, unfamiliarity with the practice may be mistaken for limited emotional competence rather than understood as a different experience.

Relational models theory further shows how expectations for participation are organized through culturally implemented forms of social relations (Fiske, 1991). In kindergartens, communal sharing, authority ranking, and equality matching can shape how children are expected to support others, follow educators' guidance, and contribute to the group. Hochschild's (1979) concept of feeling rules further clarifies how social settings define what individuals ought to feel and express. Through adult modeling, peer interaction, and repeated outdoor practices, children encounter expectations that privilege enthusiasm, confidence, persistence, and calmness under uncomfortable outdoor conditions. Reluctance, fear, anger, or bodily discomfort may consequently be interpreted as failures of participation rather than meaningful responses to demanding situations. For instance, a child who cannot cope with cold conditions, seeks distance from the group, or refuses an activity may be registering bodily limits and attempting to regulate their exposure. This response may nevertheless be interpreted as indicating insufficient resilience, autonomy, or emotional competence. The issue may therefore lie not in an absence of emotional capacities but in a mismatch between how they are expressed and institutionally recognized.

This risk is higher when the cultural premises of friluftsliv are taken for granted. Norwegian constructions of a “good” childhood have frequently associated nature with freedom, independence, and healthy self-development (Gullestad, 1997; Nilsen, 2008). And assumptions about children's wellbeing outdoors have been recognized to operate as a hidden curriculum in Norwegian kindergartens (Kaarby and Tandberg, 2017). Although culturally and historically produced, these ideals may appear natural and universal, making enjoyment of outdoor life and comfortable navigation of natural environments implicit standards of a pursuable childhood. Children who express enjoyment and mastery are then more easily recognized as capable participants, whereas those whose responses do not fit the expected emotional repertoire may appear deficient.

From an emotion niche perspective, exclusion concerns unequal access to the emotionally meaningful forms of participation through which belonging develops (Fiske, 2022). Children who struggle to participate in the “emotional logic” of friluftsliv may have less access to communal sharing, recognition, and collective accomplishment, and may consequently see themselves (or be seen by others) as less competent participants. This inclusive or exclusive potential of institutional friluftsliv does not reside in the practice but depends on how adults organize it, interpret children's responses, and adapt its material, relational, and emotional demands. Inclusion therefore requires more than physical access; it also depends on the extent to which children's diverse emotional expressions are legible within dominant cultural and relational frameworks.

5 Discussion and future directions

Our central claim in this paper is that culturally organized practices such as friluftsliv in Norwegian kindergartens provide settings in which emotional capacities are expressed and shape which emotional responses are elicited, valued, and recognized as competent. Conceptualizing friluftsliv as a setting of emotion socialization and, more specifically, an institutional emotion niche draws attention to how everyday ECEC practices organize children's emotional experiences and contribute to the development of culturally valued forms of emotional competence.

This perspective paper contributes to both emotion research and outdoor studies by extending individual accounts of emotional competence to include the practices, relationships, and material environments in nature contexts through which competence develops and becomes visible. Such practices can both enable and constrain participation. Opportunities to gain and display recognized forms of emotional competence are shaped by embodied histories, cultural familiarity, material resources, and social relationships. A central distinction is therefore between children's emotional capacities and their institutional recognition. If emotional competence develops through culturally organized practices, future research should focus on how these practices are structured, embodied, and interpreted in institutional settings. Conceptualizing friluftsliv as an institutional emotion niche suggests three interrelated directions concerning embodied environmental experiences, emotional display rules, and identity and belonging:

5.1 Children's embodied environmental experiences

Participation in friluftsliv is fundamentally bodily: children move through terrain, encounter changing weather, and engage with water, mud, sticks, and rocks. These encounters are interpreted through children's prior personal and sociocultural experiences. Previous Norwegian studies show that children's exploration and engagement in natural settings emerge relationally through interactions among their bodily abilities, social relations, and environmental possibilities (Bjørgen, 2016; Sanderud et al., 2020). Future research on children's emotions in friluftsliv should examine more closely how bodily dispositions, environmental affordances, cultural meanings, and educators' responses jointly shape whether conditions such as cold, wetness, or exposure are experienced as exciting, manageable, or distressing. Longitudinal, child-centered research could examine how these emotional experiences change with growing familiarity. Emotional competence in the outdoors may include noticing bodily sensations, communicating limits, seeking assistance, and finding alternative ways of participating that go beyond just tolerating discomfort. For ECEC practice, this means, for instance, treating discomfort as information about the relationship between the child and the situation and adapting the pace, support, or material demands accordingly.

5.2 Socialization into culturally valued emotional display rules

Participation in friluftsliv involves experiencing emotions and learning which responses are regarded as appropriate. Through everyday interactions, educators communicate expectations by framing discomfort as manageable, encouraging persistence, and valuing enjoyment and mastery (Cole and Tan, 2015). Future research should distinguish between display rules (what children are expected to express) and feeling rules (what they are expected to feel) (Hochschild, 1979) and examine how both are communicated and negotiated in practice. Research could also explore how predictability, pacing, and co-regulation influence children's ability to engage in emotionally demanding situations. It could be fruitful to investigate whether children who are less familiar with these expectations face a greater burden of emotion work by having to manage discomfort while displaying engagement in recognizable ways. Additionally, research across the kindergarten–school transition could examine whether these emotional orientations are sustained or altered as children enter a differently organized educational setting.

Children enter educational settings with expectations shaped by family practices and cultural norms; when institutional expectations remain implicit, differences in emotional expression may be interpreted as deficits. We therefore suggest that educators reflect on these expectations and recognize multiple legitimate expressions of discomfort, hesitation, enjoyment, and mastery while continuing to support participation.

5.3 Identity formation and belonging in shared practices

Participation in shared practices shapes how children understand themselves and their place within a group. Friluftsliv can foster a sense of being a child who enjoys nature, endures challenges, and participates in collective routines. Shared engagement can intensify communal-sharing relations and feelings of belonging, but physical co-presence should not be assumed to produce belonging (Fiske, 1991). Future research should examine how recognition develops over time, particularly when children's experiences differ from institutional expectations. Research should also approach children as contributors to, not just recipients of, cultural practices. Because such practices are continually reproduced and transformed through participation, children may introduce alternative ways of engaging with nature and others that challenge established norms. Involving children and their families in shaping outdoor routines could create multiple routes to competence and belonging and reveal how institutional emotion niches evolve and can become more inclusive.

This argument neither means to treat friluftsliv as inherently inclusive or exclusive nor discounts the importance of biological dispositions. Emotional experience and recognition emerge relationally through interactions among children's dispositions and histories, educators, environments, and institutional expectations.

6 Conclusion

As a conceptual Perspective paper, this article identifies possible mechanisms and questions. How particular children experience friluftsliv and other outdoor based practices is likely to vary across institutions and communities. Although this present analysis is in the context of Norwegian kindergartens, the broader question extends beyond this context: how do culturally valued institutional practices shape what children are expected to feel and what becomes recognized as emotional competence? Comparative research could illuminate shared mechanisms and culturally specific pathways. Understanding friluftsliv as an institutional emotion niche offers a fruitful way to examine how children learn to feel, participate, and belong through shared practices, and how those practices might become more responsive to diverse experiences.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Daniela Bulgarelli, University of Turin, Italy

Reviewed by: Aniko Zsolnai, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary

Luana Zanotto, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil