Article & Journal Resources

By Delia Lloyd
Published: December 11, 2007

LONDON: I recently took a trip through the English countryside with my family. On our way back to London, we stopped at a guest house with a marvelous, extensive yard. My two children - trapped for six days in a cramped minivan as they beheld an endless array of thatched roofs, roman ruins and medieval tithing barns - promptly began running, shrieking, and jumping to celebrate their new-found freedom. When I went to check out the next morning, I mentioned to the proprietor that we'd love to come back sometime. Without missing a beat he smiled and said, "Yes, do come back when the children are older." I laughed politely. He wasn't joking.

It's a funny thing I've noticed since arriving here 10 months ago. I wouldn't say that the English don't like kids, but they do expect them to grow up faster. You see this most readily in the classroom. The English version of kindergarten - "reception" - takes place at the age of four. At this point, children begin attending school for a full (six and a half hour) day, and they also begin learning to read and doing homework.

Sometimes, this starts even earlier. At the first preschool my daughter attended here there was a staff member whose job it was to individually tutor three and four year-olds with reading.

The whole idea of "play-based education," which takes up so much emotional space in America, is a nonstarter over here. Even the groovier preschools - like the one my daughter attends, which offers gymnastics and yoga - still expect students to learn the basics, preferably in French!

The extracurricular activities too are more hard core. Drama classes don't advertise creativity; they talk about self-confidence, public-speaking and diction. Swimming lessons are not about making kids more comfortable in the water. They're about learning the backstroke, dammit!

And try finding a playground in London for children over five. I live in a neighborhood with a disproportionate number of elementary schools, and the closest play area not designed for toddlers is more than a 30-minute walk away. The message seems to be that when you hit five, playtime is over.

Then there's discipline. In contrast to America, it's perfectly O.K. to yell at a child. I did a double-take the first time I heard a teacher give a three-year-old a time out. It wasn't just what she said - but the tone she used - that made me think I'd been air-lifted into the land of Oliver Twist. No one else seemed to be shocked.

Indeed, the few occasions when I've been complimented by strangers for my parenting here were all moments when I was disciplining my kids. Perhaps people were simply surprised to see an American being strict.

What is clear is that by the time they're six, children should not only be familiar with the works of Jane Austen, they should also have cultivated her heroines' manners.

There surely are different parenting philosophies in the two countries. In America, for example, "Attachment Parenting" has been growing in popularity. The basic thrust is that infants naturally seek closeness to another person (their mother) and feel secure when that person is present. So you want to engender practices that facilitate this physical bond, like breast-feeding and co-sleeping. Because you take cues from the child, it's inappropriate to set deadlines for reaching certain milestones, like toilet training, before he or she is ready. Not surprisingly, you'll find chapters of Attachment Parenting International in 35 states, while in Britain, the total number is three.

It would be tempting to conclude that the more severe nature of childhood in England has had nefarious consequences, rendering children, well, unhappier. And it's true that in a recent Unicef study, Britain came in last in a survey of 18 rich countries on an overall measure of child well-being.

But guess who came in 17th? The United States. The two countries were statistically indistinguishable from each other on most indicators.

So what can we conclude from this? Not much. The longer I'm here, the less I'm bothered by it all. When I arrived, I practically had an ulcer trying to navigate my 5-year-old son through the Oxford Learning Tree, the popular British reading program. "Back home he'd be doing Play Dough and Legos," I kept thinking to myself, "not trying to figure out why 'kit' becomes 'kite' when you add the final 'e.' "

Now, I badger his teacher to give him extra math homework! Is he happy? Who knows? I'm too busy signing him up for Mandarin fencing lessons.

Delia Lloyd is a writer living in London.