Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

by Christine Gross-Loh

The idea is this: If you hone a baby’s sense of affiliation to those around him, and respect his innate sense that he is one with others, he will feel security as he grows up and eventually become an independent contributing member of his community who can take responsibility for himself.

It’s rather difficult, he told me on the phone, for a nation to be simultaneously corporate-friendly and promote the well-being of children, given that these two aims are often at odds.

“In general, I think Swedes put more emphasis on being a good person—doing the right thing, being good stewards of the environment—over making a name for oneself,” she told me.

American Lack of community?

It turns out that when parents and educators send children the message that their needs and their individual happiness and dreams are more important than other things, like being a compassionate, ethical, hard-working person, it makes them unhappy. People who have been told to put themselves and their needs first29 feel empty and discontented, and dissatisfied with themselves because they feel they deserve to be special rather than accepting and understanding the ways that our ordinariness connects us to other human beings.

in East Asia, success and failure are viewed as part of a continuum, a natural and harmonious cycle and process that is just a part of life. This is a lesson children absorb too, and it makes it easier for them to accept successes and failures with equanimity and resilience.

relaxed, tolerant attitude toward children.

sister. We’re anxious that if we don’t take the lead in shaping our children’s natures by disciplining them, making sure they share, and protecting them from bad influences, they will never develop a moral compass. In contrast, the Japanese have a more relaxed attitude toward misbehavior. Some researchers attribute10 the “often-observed public misbehavior of Japanese children” (who, it turns out, are famed for their carefree rambunctiousness) to a cultural belief that young children are semi-divine, still partly rooted in the spiritual world and thus too young for discipline. Another belief is that babies are born pure11, untainted, and good—even superior to adults. For most of my Japanese friends, it was simply about believing that all children have basically good intentions and that we can best support them in their growth by holding age-appropriate expectations. People

A mischievous child was nothing12 to be ashamed of or hide; aggression wasn’t something to feel so mortified by. Misbehavior among children in Japan was not an early sign of a life of crime, but a sign that they were still little kids.

a deeply rooted cultural notion: trust in children’s innate positive desire to learn and adapt socially. That desire to adapt and get along is what will motivate kids to mature more efficiently than adults hurrying them along.

merit in their having had time and space in early childhood to be with children with all sorts of personalities, without adults closely mediating their relationships. These children had had years of daily, raw practice in what humans need to do to get along.

If the people around us trust that we will grow and mature in time, we feel less pressure than if we believe that we need to hurry up and change because we’re not acceptable right now as we are. I

If they don’t have that chance to experience these small risks, though (because of an overly protective parent, say, or a too-safe playing environment), they won’t be able to become physically competent and safe. “Allowing children to handle risks on their own with their own bodies, their own minds, and through their own assessment and courage, is the most important safety protection you can give a child,”

Open-ended play and downtime are both important and productive for children.

kids who play freely and abundantly—kids who are engaging in open-ended play that is self-determined and involves give-and-take with one another—are actually building skills in perspective taking, self-direction, and creative thinking.

it the “flexibility hypothesis26” and speculates that the sheer variety of different ways that young mammals play is to help train their brains to be flexible and adaptable and to face the unexpected.

Many American parents, in a somewhat unique twist not seen in most other cultures, frequently sit and actually play together with their children.

Research confirms that a day that includes breaks for physical exercise is beneficial to productivity.

there are undeniable and irreplaceable benefits in play with multi-age peers, frequent physical breaks, and ample unstructured time.

The benefits of play seem, to me, to be as crucial for our kids’ futures as anything we enroll them in, because through play they internalize a valuable lifelong attitude: the idea that they have the power to make something of their own lives, and that they can create so much out of so little.

It’s our high expectations, not friendly permissiveness or monitoring, controlling behavior, that motivate kids in a positive direction.

Finland deliberately moved away from a highly centralized system and extensive tracking and testing. Instead, they have implemented a system that relies on hiring highly qualified teachers who are given a lot of autonomy. In addition, the Finnish government provides more funds to schools that face challenges, rather than penalizing them. Finally, it doesn’t use external tests to evaluate how schools are doing.

kids don’t get any homework or grades until age eleven.

The school day is staggered even in primary school: students told me that some days they came to school at ten, and stayed for just four hours.

Finnish Lessons: What the World Can Learn from Educational Change in Finland,

Through the act of speaking a polite, albeit formulaic sentence (“Pleased to meet you,” “Won’t you come in?” “Thank you for coming over”), we convey a much deeper meaning, in shorthand both parties know: “I see you, and you are important to me.” When formulas like this are embedded in daily life, they give children the chance several times a day to feel valued within a web of social relationships.

if you look at the range of human societies across the globe and throughout time, you find that it is unusual for a mother and her partner to take sole responsibility for pregnancy, birth, and the rearing of an infant.

“As much as experts might assert that it ‘takes a village to raise a child,’ for most American parents, the village is absent.”

In America we are told how important it is to teach our babies to become independent, but then we help, closely monitor, and control them as they grow up. In other cultures, the dependency of very small children isn’t looked upon as problematic or pathological. In other cultures children mature more slowly in many ways. Parents allow for an early childhood free of the pressures our children feel at a very young age to behave, to make choices and negotiate, to assert their individuality, to seek attention, to master formal learning. In other countries, families are focused, consistent, and clear in their guidelines for how to treat others, and then offer children increasingly substantial responsibilities and physical independence as they grow older.

Some things matter and have surprisingly broad effects, such as encouraging our children’s awareness of others around them and facilitating their ability to do things for themselves. Other things, such as accelerated classes, a stimulating environment, or the “right” possessions, don’t matter as much as our culture tells us they do. It would be a powerful combination if we taught our children that, yes, their questions, opinions, talents, and accomplishments are genuinely important, and that kindness, empathy, self-reliance, and community are important as well.