What is going on with British kids?

[FrenchAreDoingSomethingRight]

On holiday in France. An upmarket holiday camp and we are the only British family here. It was recommended by a French friend and I didn't realise it only has French families on holiday

Dinner is set 3 course dinner. My kids are 5 and 3. My older boy has ADHD we think (referred by school), our younger one doesn't as far as we know. Both kids are trying their hardest at dinner. There is v loud music playing and the pool party bit is still open. They run off after every course for a dance. Older one tries to stand up sometimes. We have colouring in books etc. Really they're fine. At restaurants and pubs they are totally average in terms of being able to sit at the table. No screens.

Not a single French kid has done anything wrong. No screens or even colouring. They might not all be talking to their parents but every single one is sitting through the whole 90 min dinner and waiting to dance at the end. So patient.

Do no French kids have ADHD or ND? Or even just kid like and cheeky? I have always tried my best with dinner times but these kids aren't even considering running off.

What is going on???

what does the age of my kids got to do with the school diner menu? 😂Have you seen the menu in a secondary recently?

Our suicide rates are lower.

Agreed the state school menus aren’t great. Although they aren’t ‘bad’ at our school either. But school lunch is one meal a day. Just as the French ‘gouter’ - which in my experience is a handful of chocolate BN biscuits or, yes, a crepe with Nutella, is not the entirety of what a French child eats in a day, nor is a less than perfect British lunch the whole picture here (fwiw our school lunches are ‘odd’, rather than bad. My dc quite regularly have something like roast beef, plain pasta, and cucumber 🤷‍♀️)

Having grown up as a dual French /UK national... the sweet spot is exactly in between the two cultures. If we take 'schooling' to mean familial as well as educational influence... too rigid on the French side, too wishy washy on the UK side.

I'm a cheap date.

Or an easy person to live with..

I'm a single parent and if ANYONE (capital letters) makes me a meal, parks it in front of me - it is relatively decent, served up on a tray in front of (their telly0 I don't have one.

My response is - thank you very much I love you...

If they wash up afterwards as well.... ecstatic...

Tim Berners-Lee might dispute that.

I thought we did - hence the geezer came on as part of the London olympics opening ceremony thing.

WWW != internet

oh gosh, before you embarrass yourself, you might want to research the subject a bit further. The French don't lack an history full of inventors, artist, engineers but the main difference is that they don't rely on their past successes like we do, they are still at it.

I do find European children to be better behaved than British children, broadly speaking.

I am considered strict by my child’s friends parents but my child is a happier and more contented child than most, so I’ll carry on doing what I’m doing. They can think what they like.

Yes I know, I was agreeing with you…

Sorry but I think this is rubbish. Obedient kids may well be creative and inventive too (I have one - creative, dreamy but fairly passive) and may too grow up to change the world (I doubt mine will do that though).

And the Germans invented the bicycle.

Two things I didn't expect to come out of this thread...the origin of the Internet and the availability of pop tarts.

😂

My experience (with NT kids) is that kids do what they are allowed to do. Brits are less conventional and have a wider range of what they consider acceptable, hence a wider range of behaviour. French people are more conventional (and I don’t mean this as an insult- my experience from living in both France and francophone Belgium is that there is a strong sense of the right way to behave, with the idea of convention being seen in a much more positive way than we Brits see it- which tells its own story) and so they have a narrower range of acceptable behaviour.

I’m not sure one way is better than the other (so long as you’re not affecting other people)- it’s more about owning your choices and not allowing your children to behave in ways that you’re not happy with.

We spent many years visiting an upmarket French holiday park - many French families with quite a few Dutch and British as well. The French kids had just as many 'devices' and ran around during meals just as much as the other nationalities.
To generalise- the Dutch were the most badly behaved and the French kids were more likely to get hit by their parents. I witnessed more than a few being whacked by their mothers when they interrupted their sunbathing!
There really didn't seem to be much difference between all the nationalities to be honest!

mumsnet - always a learning curve eh love it

I’m pretty sure we still have inventors, artists and engineers

Now come on sweet. Wasn't it the suffragettes? (Cat firmly place amongst pigeons...)

It's such an interesting one. I've been a stay at home parent. No screens, expectation to sit up at the table to eat and enjoy our food, but my child just absolutely can not sit on his butt for long enough to eat his food.

I know a child who is a night mare, swings off all furniture when mum is around. When dad is around he is so well behaved... He then said his dad smacks him. So maybe there is firmer discipline in these other countries?

Wrong thread?

We are still doing stuff. Magnox reactors, ARM chips, the Raspberry Pi, Jenga, telephone banking, IVF, and the remote controller are all recent British inventions.

However
Most of these things were invented when children here in the UK were ‘seen and not heard’ and had a much stricter upbringing than even the strictest of parents today.

PS the Greeks invented flush toilets in 1700BC. Excavations in Knossos. Although other contenders are the Romans and even India. Not the Brits though.

Safety bicycle, not dandy horse.