Of American angels and British brats

The setting is a café in prime residential London. A man with lots of what the 45th US president called “executive time” is reading alone when in rolls an Abrams tank that it pleases its owners to call a pram. What ensues is a scene that Hogarth would have turned into a print called something like “Bachelor’s Torment”. It contains: the minute or nine it takes the family to sit down; their territorial conquest of half the room; their conscription of the low-wage waitress as auxiliary day care. Noise being hard to pictorialise, the artist can’t do justice to the screams of an infant as they flit in and out of the exclusive aural range of dogs.

Call it luck but, during four years in America, across both coasts, I witnessed the above literally never. “What’s different here?” I’d wonder, looking around the sinister peace of Los Feliz or Kalorama. “What’s missing?” At times, such was the Victorian inconspicuousness of children that it took some effort to remember humans don’t emerge aged 18 from sterile white pods.

To call American parenting “better” or even just “stricter” would upset my compatriots at an already tough moment in our national story. And the US style has its issues, no doubt. The hothousing and sometimes criminal chicanery around college admissions. The too-slow induction of children into alcohol, which can store up a nasty binge at 21. People can also take different views on the wisdom of Campbell as a girl’s name.

In the end, though, the American approach respects borders: between children and adults, between the family and the rest of society. For non-parents in the immediate vicinity, the effect on quality of life isn’t trivial.

I am left to conclude, as a beaker flies overhead, that relaxed parenting is just one expression of a national trait that I otherwise cherish

Spotting the transatlantic difference in parenting is one thing. Accounting for it is harder. Theories suggest themselves and then fall apart in your hands. For a religious nation, America’s welfare state offers few incentives to have children. If you don’t get parental leave or fiscal transfers, perhaps you are less likely to assume that your child is of profound interest to the general citizenry. But then France offers no lack of inducements to procreate. And children there seem quiet enough.

Another theory has to do with the size of the average British dwelling. If your children are pressed for room in one of the west’s denser countries, public spaces become a valve: an outlet for antic energy-expenditure. Here again, though, we are spoilt for counter-examples. Families in Tokyo and Hong Kong don’t have bigger homes than those in Primrose Hill. Where would you rather brave a mid-morning coffee?

I am left to conclude, as a beaker flies overhead, that relaxed parenting is just one expression of a national trait that I otherwise cherish. Britain is a lax and coarse culture. This is not just compared with its costume-drama-shaped global brand, but with the US, whose reputation as a brash free-for-all somehow survives the almost quaint civility of so much actual life there.

Earlier this month, I went out with a few journalists I hadn’t met before. Ninety or so seconds of pleasantries passed before it became a verbal tempest about our industry: who is unoriginal, who writes like a klutz, who is there on account of his old man. The chat was lacking in humility, decorum and consideration for others. I can’t wait to do it again. After the unexpected formalities of America, it was a kind of exhalation.

French and Italian Londoners often cite the looseness of life here as the draw. (Germans, who have Berlin and Hamburg to fall back on, stress it less.) But a culture in which it is fine to dress weirdly, or break rules of food and drink, or traduce one’s professional peers with near-strangers, is also one in which parents might not read a room before loosing their kids on it. It is hopeless of me to savour the rough-and-tumble in most areas of life and then expect high manners in another. That thought is some consolation, in this café, as a family acts as though it takes Victoria Park village to raise a child.

Email Janan at [email protected]

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