The global Children project

What is The global Children project?

The Global Children project, is a book about altruism and how we could better understand and respect each other. It is a book about varoius countries in the world, described from children´s perspective. Everyday life experiences to explore key areas like geography, religion and history.

The story behind the project…from the author.

Dear reader.

This is a very personal project. I have a son born 2005 and two daughters, born 2001 and 2007 respectively. I am pursuing a dream to write a book for children that combines educational information on a child´s level of how rich and complex and diverse our world is and at the same time having fun while increasing reading abilities.

At first, I just wanted to write an interesting book for my son Sebastian, when he was struggling learning how to read. A book to show him and his sisters different parts of the world – what is different and what is similar among us all on the planet. The book should open his eyes to other perspectives than we have in our little small town, open the world of geography (I love to travel and meet new perspectives) and different cultures and religions. Hopefully making him curious to find out more and make him feel part of the world and learning to read. To make it interesting to him I wanted to find boys the same age around the world and have them describe their everyday life – small and big things that happen in a boy´s life. Things like having a sibling, going to school, playdates and going on holidays as well as what to eat in school and how to co-op with the older students, what are the favorite games etc. Then mix these small everyday life things with bigger issues like what happens when you die, why is one god present in one country and not in another, etc. Using an explorative tone without judging or pointing fingers. The curiosity of a child is often just that – curiosity to understand more without any prejudice which can be very enlightening and liberating when talking of more complicated and sometimes infected issues.

We also have two fantastic daughters and one can wonder why I did not write about girls instead. Well, having travelled to some countries in the world it is very apparent to me that all girls around the world do not have the same possibilities and thus the differences are in some cases huge! Even though this is a very important topic to address I have chosen not to bring that dimension into this, my first book, yet.

As I told friends about the idea of the book it seemed that more would like to read it, with their children. And maybe it could even be complementary or part of education in primary school.
So now the idea has matured a bit more with me and thus; The main purpose of the book is to support integration and increase understanding cross cultures and nations by describing a country and culture from the boys perspective. The idea is to describe how things are – without any valuation or judgments – from the kid’s perspective in their words.
My dream scenario is if this book can help bringing us closer together and thus increase understanding for one another and decrease the fear we feel towards each-other. This fear is often fueling conflicts and excluding behavior between people.

To give the right perspective I have interviewed boys born 2005 in different countries around the world. Usually the contact is via one of the parents and in English. Which of course limits the scope but still gives a wide variety.