They aren't better parents because they're culturally superior

They just live in countries that don't hate them the end

I recently saw a NY Times article discussing the phenomenon of extreme parental stress caused by “intensive parenting” in the United States, citing “an intense culture of comparison, exacerbated by the internet” leaving “many families feeling exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind.” The article mentioned that policymakers need to focus on supporting parents, but in equal weight, if not more so, was the argument that America’s culture of parenting was the problem.

Having raised kids for 18 years in the United States and the past 5 years in The Netherlands, I feel qualified to assert that discussing a problematic “culture of parenting” in the USA is a frivolous, misleading, and irrelevant focus that does nothing but deflect from the real problem, which is that America hates people.

Okay, I’ll say something remotely helpful: It is impossible to summarize the breadth and depth of difference it makes to parent in a society that prioritizes things like labor rights, work-life balance, healthcare, childcare, and well-funded schools, even for poor and middle-class folks.

It is impossible for me to convey how far the threads of social welfare nets extend; they are woven through every single area of parenting life.

As much as we may in the US give lip-service to universal healthcare, parental leave, labor rights, and childcare subsidies as key tenets of “good parenting,” just below these assertions is the implication that if American parents simply tried harder, they would not be so stressed and they would parent better.

As usual in the commodified cesspool of the United States, where only the marketable is worthy of our sustained attention, the narrative bombards American parents relentlessly: Others do it better because they are culturally superior. Always focus on the culture. It sells better. You can write books on it. Sell countless guides. Really market that shit as an attainable thing you, too, can have in your middle-class American neighborhood.

The way Scandinavians let their babies sleep outside and their kids play all day in nature. The Dutch kids eating chocolate sprinkles in the morning and biking everywhere. The way the French do, well, everything.

They are not better people. They live in societies with better policies.

They live in countries that recognize their basic humanity and this gives them space to parent in better ways. “Better.” You get it.

Without experiencing it you really can’t imagine how different it is to parent in a place like The Netherlands, where all children’s healthcare is covered for free (yes, we pay taxes. I’ll get to that in a moment), schools are not funded by locally property taxes, universal pensions exist, as well as things like “papadag,” or “daddy day,” which allows fathers to take a weekly half or full day off work, paid in full or at 70%, to spend with their kids.

Labor rights, collective bargaining, and the money you get every 3 months for each child or teenager, because, in the words of the government, every child in The Netherlands deserves a certain quality of life — all of this creates an environment that would be unrecognizable to the everyday American. The childcare subsidies that extend to the middle class. The housing subsidies that extend to the middle class. The note on the bottom of all your bills: “Having trouble paying? Call this number.” Guaranteed paid vacations of at least 6 weeks a year. As many paid sick days as you need.

A year paid or almost completely paid to recover from “burnout,” which is, incidentally, the state of the average American worker: so stressed you can’t sleep, facing health issues from stress, unable to function — here, the normal American lifestyle is considered a serious and treatable illness. I know many people who have taken a year off work, PAID, to get treated for and recover from burnout. Google it. Blow your own mind.

In the USA we have none of this. If you’re rich enough you can have all of these things. And the very poor, yes, have some assistance, but they have a whole slew of other dangers and indignities to their lives: insecure, unsafe housing, poorly funded schools, gun violence, drugs and mental health crises, neighborhoods in food deserts, parents working three jobs and still barely surviving.

My husband Mac and I fell in the common American middle-class position of not qualifying for help but also unable to afford our lives. I remember impossible predicaments occurring so often in our lives. The most profound of which was when my husband was an apprentice union ironworker, waking up at 4am to drive 2 hours (to beat morning traffic) into the San Francisco Bay Area because the wages were higher (also unheard of in Europe to have a commute like that), and I was a wannabe stay-at-home mother of three: two kids ages 8 and 4, and a newborn.

We lived in a small 1970s home in a poor, mostly Latino town that edged the white person town about 15 minutes from us, where the wealthy lived and the schools were good. We lived next to an alcoholic old white dude who used to poison neighborhood cats (he killed two of ours before we realized what was happening), a meth-cooking couple two doors down, and a bunch of other families like us, trying to get by and waking up to baggies and syringes in their driveways where their toddlers were walking.