How are you parenting this month? Maybe you are following the Finns, encouraging your children to learn through joyful, unstructured play and boundless independence. That’s the advice from Helsinki-based American teacher Timothy Walker, whose book Teach Like Finland holds out the glittering prize of an eight-year-old who can make you dinner and think critically.
Perhaps you prefer the German model. Teutonic child rearing certainly sounds more fun than ours. In Achtung Baby, another recent parenting primer, American and sometime Berlin resident Sara Zaske describes how, in a daring blend of Japanese gameshow and Lord of the Flies, German parents equip their children with fire, knives and instruction in how to use them, then stand back and cultivate calm detachment. I can’t imagine there are many parents of any nationality who have not, at some point, been tempted to do this, but it is refreshing to find it forming the basis of a parenting philosophy. I am being flippant, of course: the real lesson from Germany and Finland is that allowing our coddled kids more freedom and free play promotes confidence, self-reliance and possibly even academic success.
Other countries do parenting better than the British, and these are just the latest in a long line of books explaining exactly how. You will doubtless remember that French children don’t throw food (thanks to firm, sexy parents who make their children wait and give them strong boundaries), and Chinese tiger mothers get results (no playdates or sleepovers, no grades below an A and no escape from violin and piano). But it turns out we could also take a leaf out of Denmark’s book (The Danish Way of Parenting, which involves free outdoor play, no ultimatums, stories that feature death and plentiful hygge) or go Dutch (The Happiest Kids in the World, thanks to lots of family time, fresh air, cycling and frank, early sex education, hopefully not all at once). A speed review of the genre reveals a distressing insistence on going outside: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing,” an expression that sounds awfully familiar, perhaps because it also exists in English, is claimed as a central tenet of many foreign parenting philosophies (except the French, for whom there is both bad weather and bad clothing: in England).
As a long-time expat myself, I have even started wondering if I can cash in on the “foreigners do it better” movement and write a how-to book of my own. Unfortunately, I currently live in Belgium, which has its own plentiful supply of sleep-averse infants, devil toddlers and teenagers who think listening to DJ Snake in public without headphones is acceptable behaviour. The only specifically Belgian parenting trait I can identify is invoking the spectre of Père Fouettard – St Nicholas’s terrifying sidekick who puts naughty children in a sack and kicks them to Spain over the festive season – to encourage good behaviour, but that is hardly the kind of enlightened childcare that makes for a bestseller.
Then again, why limit myself to a country? Maybe I can cash in on my other life experiences. I’ve had a few ideas: Northerners Don’t Wear Coats, for example, which would examine how shivering on the windswept streets of Yorkshire towns boosts your immune system and mental toughness. Might there be an appetite for The 1970s Dad Plan: raise happy, self-reliant kids by leaving them in a rusting Alfa Spider with a packet of Golden Wonder crisps and a bottle of pop for 18 years? Or how about Hamster Mother (we’ve had a lot of pets): get a bit flustered and eat seven and a half of your children?
They might not be quite this daft, but these books sell idealised generalisations that no one can live up to, not least the French, Dutch or German parents bemused by our fascination with them. They package up and present other countries’ parenting to us as a Swallows and Amazons-style promised land of wholesome, healthy togetherness, in which calm, caring yet robust parents and independent, fuss-free kids co-exist in perfect harmony. Of course, it is an attractive prospect.
As I write, my own children are on holiday yet again (I would move instantly to any country that could guarantee they would stay in school for more than three weeks at a time). It is a beautiful day, but they are slumped in semi-darkness, their porridgey complexions illuminated by flickering plumes of pixelated blood as they listlessly kill virtual strangers. Their real-life knife and fire-setting skills are non-existent and they seem markedly disinclined to leave the house. If there are easy, imported solutions to our contemporary parenting anxieties (screens, obesity, sexting), it is no surprise we are lining up to buy into them.
I thought I had kicked my child-rearing book habit after my second son was born, not because I had developed a serene confidence in my abilities, but because everything I read confirmed how hideously, irremediably wrong I had already gone with the first. Now, though, the profusion of articles on foreign child-rearing philosophies has drawn me back in, extra-flammable moth to super-didactic flame, craving that hit of guilt and anxiety and, just maybe, a little hope. When one of your children has spoken only in parsimoniously rationed monosyllables (“no”, “nothing” or “I need €50”) for 18 months and the other has left a sheet of paper in the recycling on which he has practised forging your signature, several hundred times and with alarming accuracy, who wouldn’t welcome guidance from a country that seems to have a handle on these matters?
Worrying how you measure up is as much a part of parenting as catching vomit in your cupped hands, and comparing yourself with others is simply human nature. But just because something comes naturally doesn’t mean we should indulge it. If I were to list the ways in which I have agonised about falling short over the past 15 years – from the dangers of cortisol exposure in the womb to reinforcing my sons’ blind collusion in the patriarchy by picking up their socks – this would be a telephone directory, not an article.
I am the least qualified person to advocate calm, confident parenting. I don’t want to come over all Farage-y, but hell, I’m going in: we need to step away from books about how other countries do it better, and not just because, if you want to know where you’re going wrong, an older family member will often be happy to oblige, for free.
It’s not that I think improving your parenting is impossible or undesirable: obviously, it’s neither. But trying to effect that change by adopting a whole new imported philosophy is a doomed endeavour. My lowest moments as a parent have come when I focused on what others were doing or achieving: the miracle baby that sleeps through the night from five weeks or the socially assured teenagers who make effortless, polite small talk. My best have been when I notice something specific I do badly (spitting fire and brimstone like an Old Testament prophet when my son comes home with bad marks, causing him to hide them, for example) and manage to modify my behaviour slightly (restraining myself from detailing the direct path from 4/10 in geography to fiery perdition every time). “Why can’t I – and, by extension, you – be more like them” is a genuinely corrosive emotion and a thief of the real joy of being around our lettuce-eschewing, fresh-air-averse children.
These books are the equivalent of that feeling you get when you go on holiday and fantasise about moving to Stockholm or raising goats in the Sierra Nevada: a nice idea, but also basically mad. Our child rearing is a product of history, geography, culture and personal experience. We can’t parent with the glacier-clear enlightenment of the Danes any more than we can stop ourselves apologising when someone treads on our toes; we don’t enjoy their generous parental leave arrangements or their gift for home furnishings. Our children won’t eat salsify like they do in France, because they aren’t being served elegant three-course meals in heavily subsidised childcare. If we let our seven-year-olds walk the streets of Britain with sticks and knives, someone would probably have us arrested.
And what about parents from the countries we are supposed to be emulating? Imagine the pressure of living up to that billing. Writing from the heart of Europe, I am well placed to tell you that even the most frequently envied nationalities don’t have everything sussed: the buses of Brussels are full of harassed women reading books called Managing Childhood Frustration, Meditation for Under-Fives or My Teen, My Battle in every imaginable language. I have met anxious, over-protective German parents and stressed-out Swedes, and my French brother-in-law only ate steak and onions and drank only Coca-Cola until he turned 30. There are probably even Danes with unattractive light fittings (well, there might be one. Somewhere).
We talked about parenting recently in my Dutch class (a League of Nations of linguistic confusion, united in our struggle against irregular verbs). At the start, a French lady said, haltingly, that she had considered taking her children to a forest and leaving them there the previous weekend; we all nodded in complete understanding. Later, we read an article that explained we should not be anxious around our children, because that would make them, in turn, anxious. Reading, I was needled into inept speech. “But,” I said, “how is this a possible thing? How must we do this? Dumb advice for anxious people. Bad!” (I sound like a Potus tweet in Dutch; it’s problematic).
Around me, representatives of many nationalities shrugged their own confusion. Then we shared our parenting doubts, fears and frustrations while practising our conjunctions – and it was wonderful. Because there is nothing more comforting than hearing that other parents – of whatever nationality – struggle, try their best and sometimes mess up. Perhaps We’re All Just Flailing Around in the Dark Here doesn’t have the requisite publishing fairy dust, but I’d read it.
Failing that, I wonder if there is actually a market for a British parenting book. Isn’t there something a bit admirable, a bit worthy of emulation, in what we do? We doubt. We worry. We even buy books about how we are doing everything wrong. And, of course, we have our own, unique, enviable qualities. So, how about British Children Don’t Leave the Teabag In or British Kids Know “How Are You” Shouldn’t Be Answered Truthfully? If I start writing now, I could give everyone in Dutch class a copy for Christmas.
We’ll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington (Macmillan, £12.99). To order a copy for £11.04, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
