Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country
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One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot in common.
Like me, he had followed his spouse to the United Kingdom for work; she was a physician, learning some new procedure to take back to Australia. He couldn’t wait to move home to his big house down the road from the beach. “Do you think you’ll ever move back to the U.S.?” he asked. Sure, eventually, I said. Or at least that was the plan.
What he said next threw me: His wife had recently been offered a job in America. “It would have been great for her career,” he said, “but we figured it would be too dangerous for the kids.”
I can’t remember what I said in response—probably something about things not being quite as bad as they seem on the news. But his comment, and the matter-of-fact way he said it, stuck with me.
For most of my life, I have never felt anything but extreme, what-are-the-odds gratitude to have been born and raised in America. We have so much: a high median income and larger-than-average houses and some of the world’s most prestigious colleges and universities. When I tell people in the U.K. that I’ve moved there from the U.S., many respond with something to the effect of “Why on earth would you do that?”
But their tone changes a little when I mention having kids. American parents have something of a reputation in Europe. We’re known for being intense, neurotic, overprotective, obsessed with academic achievement—“the opposite of relaxed,” , a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, told me. Some Europeans worry that American child-rearing will take there. Yet many of the parents I’ve spoken with also express some sympathy, or even pity, for American parents. They
