Debating between these two countries. Which is better to bring children up in?

[Mixedfeelings89]

England or America. I am from England, Husband is American. We are not rich, nor poor therefore we would be living a average lifestyle. My only concern is which country will be better for the children? If we didn't have children I wouldn't really care which country either way. I just want the best for the children. Children are not yet school age, if that makes a difference.

Thanks in advance.

@User4875etc

There are no overweight people in the UK?

Americans don't cut their muffins in half too?

@Delatron I have to agree with Knitnerd's comment, which suits your rants here perfectly - your comments are the British equivalent of theories about Europe that are dear to the heart of Americans who think socialism is the work of the devil himself.

In particular, the refusal to believe that people go about their lives without anxiously biting their nails to the quick over guns comes across as deliberate obtuseness at this point.

I’m not being obtuse to not want to live in a country where children get shot at school.

Like I said, I’m glad it’s no concern of yours. But I couldn’t send my child to school over there. I’m not sure how many times I need to say this? Shooter drills, special backpacks so they don’t get shot…

Sorry for ranting about your gun culture. Sorry for thinking it’s awful that 10 year olds get their heads blown off at school and nothing changes….

No thank you - happy here.

And @Delatron, an opinion that squarely contradicts the lived experience of another person is not a valid opinion.

It’s my personal opinion 🤣. You can’t argue with it! As much as you are trying to downplay the gun issue. In Florida it would be a concern for many and a reason not to live there. Maybe read back through the thread?

Just because you don’t care about guns doesn’t mean that it’s not an important issue to other people.

@Delatron - why not start a thread entitled 'Who wants to rant about guns in the US with me?'

Your refusal to take on board what people living in the US are saying about their daily lives and your hijacking of the thread in order to blast your pet theories about the impact of guns in the US, from the bosom of leafy England, is probably not helpful to the OP.

And your refusal to listen to the many, many more people on this thread who have stated they wouldn’t live in the U.S. because they of the gun culture. I’m not really a lone voice am I?

I was going to go back and count how many posters mentioned guns. But by the end of the first page I counted 12 posters. And this is a 20 page thread… But yes it’s just me with the issue.

Or maybe the only one stupid enough to engage with you…

This just isn't true though. For example, many people have never experienced domestic abuse, or knife crime, or CSA. That is their lived experience. Does that mean that someone who believes these things are a major issue does not have a valid opinion?

You need to read my posts, @JesusInTheCabbageVan , and also Delatron's rants.

I live in the US. I'm telling Delatron what my lived experience is. She's telling me it couldn't possibly be true. Nobody living in America could possibly feel safe because she imagines guns dominate life here.

Her opinion of life in the US is based on sensational news. Mine is based on lived experience. Her opinion on life in the US is therefore not valid.

As an interesting little experiment, I painted a bleak picture of life in the UK, and she has responded that none of the weekend piss and vomit fests featuring people falling down drunk in the streets, the vast chasm between north and south, etc., affects her at all, and in fact the UK is so free of petty crime she leaves her bikes in a shed without ever bothering to lock it. So it's ok for her to rant about life in the US, but when faced with stories associated with the drinking culture in the UK and inequality so deeply entrenched that it's necessary to have a government leveling ministry, she digs in and accuses me of knowing nothing about the UK.

I don't like to downplay the gun issue in the USA, but at the same time it's quite frustrating not to have people acknowledge the regional, economic, and racial disparities in gun violence and act as if we're all under constant siege. In fact, this is a legitimate critique of US gun policy: the consequences do not fall equally. The people who institute policy do not suffer its consequences.

On a by state basis alone, the variation is staggering. Massachusetts has 3.7 deaths per 100,000 people annually. Mississippi is 28.5. Jackson, MS has a gun homicide rate of 69/100K. New York City? 3. (These are specifically homicides; the CDC gun death totals include accidents and suicides.)

@mathanxiety admittedly I'm late to the debate. I read the posts on that page, but I'm afraid I'm not committed enough to comb through all of them and see who I agree with! However, I understand where you're coming from with your latest post. Especially as I live somewhere where weekly piss and vomit fests are very much a thing Plus it's fair to say that the UK isn't in a particularly strong position to criticise anyone right now. We're (hopefully) working on that.

Your lived experience is not particularly relevant @mathanxiety as the OP is considering Florida.

One poster who did post something relevant actually lived in Florida and described the school situation as ‘horrible’ and was very much affected by the gun culture over there and ended up moving back over here. She was the one who also mentioned kids going to school with armoured back packs, constant shooter drills. The layout of the school wasn’t particularly secure - long outdoor buildings that anyone could access.

Thats is relevant. You ranting at me about piss and vomit and road traffic accidents is not.

This is a far more relevant post. From someone who has actually lived in Florida. Because as you say every state is different.

Yes, the portion sizes are enormous. Same in Canada.
Isn't this why the culture of the doggy bag exists?

Also totally depends on where you are. Brunch places, pizza etc - yep massive portions with the expectation you either share, or pack half of it up to go. Anywhere posh, trendy or healthy (eg taco places, poke bowl places, Korean places), you get a pretty normal portion. A Tim Horton’s bagel is just a normal sized bagel.

We’ve actually started taking stuff to go a lot more since we moved back - way better than trying to finish a whole pizza myself because I don’t want to waste food, and great when you have a five year old’s tiny tummy to cater for. I think the pandemic has helped, so many places are on Deliveroo now, which means that they all have takeaway boxes available.

Oh yeah forgot about the alligators 🤣. We had one in our pool once after the screen door had been left open and had to call the gator guy to come and remove it. Luckily only a small one.

UK.
Couldn’t believe put up with religious fanatics, guns, complete disregard for any ‘socialist’ concept whatsoever like NHS type healthcare

Heaven forbid getting sick in the US, would have a huge bill on top of your illness. That’s pretty intolerable for a ‘superpower’

@Delatron - I am happy to note you have finally accepted that life can proceed happily in some parts of the US, and that people's lives are not dominated by guns.

Sadly, you are still falling for sensation in the case of Florida. I'm guessing you've never lived there yourself.

The poster's observations are very different from the experience of several old school friends of mine who live in FL (one in Tampa, two in Tallahassee, one in Jacksonville, one in Gainesville) and have brought up children there, but not in gated communities. It also flies in the face of the experience of the millions who rent an AirBnB and take their families to the Sunshine State for a vacation. They have made peace with the gators, the spiders and snakes, the heat, and the mould, which is a given in areas of high humidity. Maybe they don't find any of that foreign, given that many are American or do a little homework before they embark on a trip. Same goes for hurricanes. It's not that hard to find out what the climate is like before you decide to live somewhere. I wouldn't like any of that personally. I don't like the heat, and alligators freak me out. Give me weirdo opossums any day or night.

"Schools are terrible" is a sweeping statement that couldn't possibly be true as a general rule, and the observation of the architecture and layout of these schools is not true as a general rule either. I'm sure there are many terrible schools. I'm sure there are many good ones too. I'm sure there are many definitions of the word 'terrible' too. For some that is code for 'there are many free school meal students/ black students/ students who speak Spanish as their first language in that school'. For some it's a genuinely objective assessment of a school, but you have no way of knowing what made the poster say that. In general, education in the US emphasises different elements of reading skills or maths at points that differ from the UK. This is not necessarily bad, just different.

the fresh fruit and veg has to be trucked in by lorry and so often the grocery shops would have barely edible fruit and veg.
This comment is bizarre. All fruit and veg is transported by truck everywhere - how is the transportation of fruit and veg accomplished in the UK? - but in the case of Florida plenty of fruit grows in the state itself. By contrast, a lot of UK fruit and veg comes from other countries, a feat of logistics which has become far more complicated than it used to be thanks to Brexit. And also thanks to Brexit, fruit and veg rots in the fields for lack of itinerant pickers. Again, though, a statement which might have referred to a single badly managed supermarket in a specific area is not qualified by the important 'Individual Results May Vary'.

All-purpose shelters are used in schools which have no safe basement areas in many states. They provide a safe place to shelter in case of tornadoes. My DCs' schools had basement areas to shelter in. Most older schools in large urban areas are equipped in this way and fire and tornado drills are conducted without scarring children for life. People are encouraged to have fire plans for their homes, and also tornado plans.

I have exILs who live in a gated community in another southern state. Their views on certain topics have become rather iron clad since they moved there. Fears of what's outside the gates have become magnified over the years. It's possibly a natural trajectory for people who chose a gated community in the first place, or maybe the close proximity of people who chose a gated community because of a surfeit of distaste for their fellow human beings had an effect. Perhaps it was the environment itself that made them embrace the fortress mentality they now exhibit. Just saying...

How many people do you know who live in gated communities in the UK? Why did they decide to live in a gated community? How in touch are they with life outside their community, as a general rule?

This is a good example. I hate to use the health system because it's not really defensible as a whole, but this isn't how it works and this is what some people don't grasp. Not everyone gets a huge bill. I don't. Lots of people don't. That's actually the problem. If we all had terrible bills, then there would be more pressure to fix it. Instead, we get working/lower middle class people who don't have the option of good insurance resenting poorer people because they get Medicaid (no premium and no out of pocket cost). That's quite besides the idiots who scream about how the government shouldn't make them buy health insurance, but still intend to go to the ER if they get hit by a car.

What's wrong with the US is fundamentally inequality. We don't have things guaranteed by the state. On these threads this is equated with not having them at all, and that's not true. The problem is that we get things like health insurance, holiday time, maternity leave if our employers want to give them, and then people applaud companies for being good and generous. I don't think this is fair, and I don't vote that way, but you need to understand the true nature of the problem.

@mathanxiety Florida is generally known for mediocre schooling. It funds it poorly, it doesn't prioritize it, and standards aren't high. It's down to Florida's whole low tax model that seeks to attract tourists and snowbirds. I know people who have taught there and in the Northeast. Florida is county school boards, not the small districts Illinois has, so segregation works very differently. (I lived near Philadelphia before this, and Pennsylvania has the same problem.) Gainesville is relatively good because of the university. People think "oh, no state income tax; that means more in my pocket!" but the value of the services they lose is greater, unless they're very wealthy.

As for the constant comments about American food: If you lived here you'd need to learn how to shop, just as any transplant to the UK does. Some chains have better produce than others. Some chains really value shipping ability and supply chains over quality. Because of shipping chains, some areas of the country are dominant for particular products (California in particular) and a large chain will choose to get lettuce shipped from Salinas throughout their season rather than switch for the few months it's grown locally. If I go to Safeway, I will get California peaches and cherries. At some other stores, I will get the ones from southern Pennsylvania (which are also what I'd find at my local farmers' market). When you shop locally you learn things like most Northeastern farmers only plant June-bearing strawberries so the season is 4 weeks long, and you only get lettuce spring and fall, because it's too hot in the summer here and the lettuce will bolt.

The US doesn't even have a grocery chain comparable to Tesco. There isn't a national traditional grocery chain. (We do have Whole Foods and Aldi, which are located throughout the US, but not in every town.) What you find in Publix in Florida is not the same as Giant in DC or Jewel in Chicago.

Jewel is rapidly being supplanted by Pete's and Tony's in Chicago; Tony's in particular has really extensive eastern European, Hispanic and south Asian offerings (10lb bags of basmati for a low price plus an extensive frozen Asian section) on top of pigs' feet, smoked meats, excellent fresh fruit and veg selection, cheapest imported dried pasta, and a deli to die for, while Pete's has less of a selection of ethnic foods but more in the way of offerings from the fresh juice bar, bakery items, excellent cheese selection, good wine, big selection of fizzy water, good smoked meats (done on premises) and Aldi continues to boom. One of the joys of traveling in the US is sampling the delights of supermarkets in different towns and cities. Looking at you, Piggly Wiggly in Kewaunee, Wisconsin...

Several rankings that I have seen place Florida's PK-12 education system squarely in the top half to top third nationally. District revenue in Illinois varies enormously depending on property taxes. The average revenue per student in my local public school district is over $19k with a state average of about $16k, and its revenue from local sources is $123.6m, compared to the state average of approx $40m per district. Obv there are many districts below that average. Educational results tend to be uneven even within states or even within city school districts (Chicago Public Schools have big disparities of attainment), and of course this is seen elsewhere too.

Thanks to the pandemic I haven’t been able to go to Chicago in a few years. Was working from memory. I do a lot of my produce shopping at H-Mart—excellent quality and the best prices. Very good fish and seafood as well.

It's horribly wasteful.

And I am talking about breakfast at a Novotel in a suburb of Toronto, frequented mainly by business travellers. Who the hell wants to take leftovers from their breakfast away in a doggy bag?

I really struggle with this because I was raised to finish my plate and psychologically I find it really hard to leave two thirds of what I have been served, even if logically I know that they served me three times what I needed. If the fried potatoes are there, I will eat them. I don't want to eat them. I don't need to eat them. I don't want them on my plate.

Another time in a different hotel I ordered the one thing on the menu that looked vaguely healthy, which was roast chicken with a green salad. They subbed the green salad for a huge portion of fries without me asking them to, and when I queried it they said most people ask them to so they assumed I would want the fries instead of the salad. They then brought me a tiny side salad and left the massive portion of fries.

I live in continental Europe and I think the food culture in North America is just dire. I couldn't live there. Not the US, not even Canada.