Where is the best place in Europe to raise a family?

[Jess850]

Where in Europe is the best or a good place to raise/continue raising a Family of Boys. Current ages 3 mths, 6 yrs and 9 yrs. Just day dreaming during a feed and wondered your thoughts? A bit random but DH and I often wonder how here compares and what it is like living in the big wide World Europe.

Enjoy!
We miss it a lot too. The splashing pool in Baetrix park, early evenings in Vondelpark or days on the beach, spring and summer are fab.
Berlin,Paris, London, Antwerp & brussels are just a train trip away.
I miss Europe!

noclue honestly! Life is not a bed of roses. We're skint - to some extent "trapped" as we can't afford to move on. My husband hates his job and I work for a bunch of arseholes.

But I honestly believe that happiness comes from within. I've lived in a fair few countries through varying circumstances and, home is where the heart is.

Of course the Netherlands is nice and I'd probably not be so happy on Chicago's south side - but if I were there it would be indicative of quite a lot going wrong in my life - so unhappiness not born out of geography!

I envy you Irishmum. Hope you love it as much as I did.

Alpine... I agree. Although I suspect my heart's still in Amsterdam, and hasn't caught up with me in SE England!

I agree, Netherlands. We lived just outside Rotterdam for 5 happy years. T'is a wonderful place to raise a family

I think this is very subjective. We have lived in Amsterdam for close to ten years and are very happy to be moving to the UK this Autumn.

Daycare in Amsterdam is very hard to find, very low quality and costs a lot (even with tax subsidies). Schools are not good. The Dutch schools have such low academic standards we didn't consider them. The subsidized international schools are also not good and the international and British school are very expensive. Apartments are expensive per square meter and likely to get more so with changes in tax deductions on mortgages. Health care is not good - both births of my children were full of mistakes by health professionals. Our GPs also failed to diagnose pneumonia, hernias etc etc and dismissed our baby's need for antibiotics to a point where she ended up very ill indeed in a hospital. Of course there are many nice points about living in Amsterdam too, otherwise we would have left sooner, but for us this is definitely not the best place in Europe to raise a family.

Also I am currently a professor in the University of Amsterdam and there is now way that I would encourage my children to study there rather than one of the better UK universities. In my scientific field it is very good but generally the levels are not high, not even in the rest of the science faculty.

Mortgage relief though Thalista! Imagine! For anyone who hasn't lived in the Netherlands, if you buy your house, the government pay a chunk of your mortgage for you, in the form of tax relief.

Okay the taxes are high - but public services work. IMHO, they don't here in the UK any more.

And daycare in the UK? Don't even get me started. I've just looked at 12 nurseries here and not one of them comes up to the standard of the one we had booked for DS when we were in Amsterdam. Compared to the Dutch ones, they're dirty, cramped and way too busy. I dread to think about schools... we've bought an over priced house in a good catchment area and we're hoping for the best, but secretly I suspect we'll have moved back out of the country by then,

I understand what you mean about Dutch healthcare though, they don't really go in for medication or anything like that, but I found that when I asked for something, eventually I got what I needed. Not that it's much comfort when you're trekking back and forth to the OLVG in the snow with a 3 week old, to be fair, but eventually I got what I wanted. Here you'd just get told that you can't have the tests you need "because of the cuts" and that's the end of the story.

Sorry, OP you asked for pluses and minuses of each country. Totally off the top of my head, for the Netherlands I'd say:

Plus points:

*Good healthcare (when you stand your ground - appointments when you want, clean hospitals, access to consultants as soon as you need to see them, that sort of thing). I've heard plenty of people slag it off mind, including Thalista, so maybe it's not that great, but it's light years ahead of the UK in my experience. For one thing, you get a maternity nurse coming to your house for a whole week after you've given birth, bathing your child, helping with breastfeeding, doing your ironing, cooking your dinner... so civilised.

*Great outdoorsy life - e.g. cycling everywhere keeps you fit and in my experience, made me feel happy most of the time.

*Everything's nicely designed. You get used to this, unfortunately and think it's normal, then you leave the Netherlands and realise that most people's homes / bars / towns are pug ugly.

*The streets are clean and well cared for

*Queens Day!! Google it. Amazing

*Good public services

*Everyone speaks English

*If you're homesick you can get UK papers, English food, British TV (well all the BBC channels anyway) and best of all - jump on a cheap flight and get back in less than an hour

*Dutch people are blunt as hell, but like the Brits, don't take them selves too seriously.

*No fighting in the streets, no aggro in the pubs and generally a nice atmosphere (until you cut someone up on a bike of course, but then you'd be asking for a mouthful!)

Downsides:

*Dutch, to British ears, can be impenetrable. It's really hard to learn, because everyone will speak to you in English.

*Everything gets done in a certain way. It's hard to put your finger on why this is annoying, but at first it is, then you get used to it. The Dutch are quite bureaucratic

*The weather is as crap as here

*If you like mountains or wild scenery, your plum out of luck.

You're, not your.

I'm really surprised about the negative experiences of Amsterdam. For me, particularly the healthcare - I couldn't ask for more (emcs/scbu + elcs). I phoned our gp late thurs for an appointment for my son - given an appt for 8:40 Fri am and by 10:20am I had a hospital appt with a paediatrician.

Housing can be very expensive, IME for those who don't leave expat enclaves. Conversely I pay under 400 a month for a 3-bed house.

All the rest aside, it clearly shows that you will never please everyone.

I also get huge tax rebates for childcare, so pay very little. Perhaps I don't earn enough to be stung. ;)

Finally, what is wrong with an educational system which has the children trilingual by the age of 12 and allows them to explore vocational careers rather than forcing them down a traditional "a-level" style route? I am delighted that my sons might leave "school" at 18 trained plumber rather than 3 failed a-levels!

i live in sweden and it is an amazing place to have kids.. the healthcare is amazing, much better than the NHS, they are very hands off in pregnancy but they have such a low infant death rate it must be a good way to do it. When you have a baby here the dad gets to stay in the hospital with you so you are allways together as a new family. We had infertility problems and you are offered up to 9 ivf attemps for free.

Also you can't put a baby in day care here before 12 months but you have more than a year paid parentla leave (usable by both the mother and father) so i cant really see why you would want to put your baby into daycare before 12 months?

When the time comes for daycare it costs around 100 pounds a month for full time daycare, you can choose any daycare you want so you can choose montisori or waldorf daycare places, most daycare places give the children organic food and the kids spend a huge amount of time outside in nature or in the city visiting museums/parks/iceskating... they go out at least once a week.

Schools are all free so no private school system (bar a couple of horrid bording schools that no one wants to use anyway) again you can choose your childs education montisori/waldorf schools are popular as are schools that teach in another language.

higher education is free for all (even people moving to sweden) so no saving for university fees, if your children want to go to a uk university sweden will pay the fees so long as the kids get swedish citerzenship.

there is not so much stranger danger here, kids of 8/9/ go on the underground alone, schools dont have fences around them.

every group of houses/apartments has their own lovely playground, ours also has a play house and swimming pool.

it has proper seasons, it snows in the winter and even in stockholm you have ski slopes and free ice rinks (on lakes and in the city squares) it is sunny in the summer, properly warm and sunny weather for weeks and weeks on end (maybe too hot for pregnant me)

taxes are actually not higher than the uk unless you earn a massive massive wage, on a wage or 30-40,000 pounds you pay the same tax as in the uk.

swedish is easy to learn also every immigrant gets free swedish lessons (if you compleat them within a year you get a 1500 pound bonus)

If you do move to sweden you have to remember that it is cold for at least 4-5 months a year, not just chilly but really really cold. There is clothing to keep you warm and if you like winter outdoor activities it is an amazing place but if you live for the summer and want a flip flop and t-shirt culture sweden wont suit you at least half the time. but you are rewarded with a really wonderful summer!

:)

I don't live in the Netherlands but nearby, so we visit quite often. I too am surprised by Thalitsa's comments. There are 2 things which stand out every time we cross the border :

the bluntness can be quite hurtful and nasty to someone not used to it - I'll never get used to it, to me if you can't say anything positive it's gob shut, the Dutch seem to take the opposite view to myself

the Dutch don't queue, they are very good at pushing in front, in a supermarket there a few weeks ago when someone put their shopping on the belt in front of mine because they had less than me, instead of a British reaction of keeping silent and smiling politely, I thew their shopping off and told them "achter mij" which was probably wrong but they sure understood

Houses are overpriced because of the tax relief and there is currently panic about the tax relief being removed, so no houses are selling. For the same net mortgage amount we will get a comparable place in the SE of the UK, I.e. tax relief didn't allow us to get a better place than we would have in the UK.

The daycare we use is far worse than daycares we have used in other countries, and we pay, net, about 20% more than we will pay in the UK. My older daughter was molested in a daycare and the main goal of the daycare was just to hush it up. This could have happened in any country, no organization would want the story getting out, but the callousness shocked me. More generally the daycares have more children per staff, poor food, fewer resources, no preschool educational provision from three, and all the ones I know are not especially clean, not a particularly nice environment.

Educational standards are not high. I would say that Dutch primaries run about one to one and a half years behind UK schools, but more importantly they do nothing for the top ten percent of children. I am certainly not saying that the UK system or anywhere else is perfect but in her subsidized international school my daughter has just been made to sit there and draw pictures all day whilst other chldren catch up to her level. We felt like our only option medium term was to send her to a private international school, fees of 16k Euros per year. In the UK she will have more options, both state and private. I think even the catchment state school will do more with her than the international school we were paying 6k Euros per year for.

I don't find public services fantastic. I use the metro to get to work and it fails about once or twice per week, delaying me by at least twenty minutes in a forty minute journey. Is this worse than the Tube, I guess not, but I would think that this doesn't happen in places like Germany or Switzerland.

Many things are rather expensive for their quality in Amsterdam. For example, one supermarket has a virtual monopoly and offers a poor choice of food at high prices. I could get better food from markets but I just don't have time for that kind of shopping around.

Again, I am not saying there aren't many nice things about living in Holland but I think there are pluses and minuses to all places. Our reason for leaving is mostly job dissatisfaction and issues with research funding, rather than most of the things mentioned above, with the poor schooling being a secondary reason.

Thalitsa, how many day-cares have you used and for how long? How many Dutch schools have your children been to and up to what age?

The UK compared to other european countries sends kids to school very very young, so i'd say most countries are a year or a year and a half behind at primary level. In my opinion it is more important to look at the outcome at the end of school. Both Sweden and the netherlands come out above the UK for final educational attainment. The drawing pictures and years of play must be helping children do better at school.

In fact the UK does NOT on average send kids to school so young compared to many other EU countries. In the Netherlands, you can start at 3/4 years old, a year earlier in the UK, most children apparently now do start at that age, even though they don't have to start for a further 2 years at age 5/6. France can start at 3 (sometimes 2.5), Belgium at 2.5 too.

At age 5-6, UK kids are however without doubt ahead of Belgians/Dutch/French, in terms of literacy, as you learn spend more time doing pre-formal education in those countries and start reading formally at 5-6, starting 2 years later than the UK. But by 16 I think you'll find the UK average (that's including privately educated too) is behind France/Belgium/Netherlands in FINA surveys on literacy and mathematical levels, so littlemissbroody is indeed right.

Not sure I'd want my boys attending some awful school in rotterdam, but where I am? Comparable if not better than your average British public school. In fact if we were to return to the UK, school fees would need to be budgeted for.

I'm so sorry to hear your daughter was molested, was it that high profile media case with the latvian/German guy? Unfortunately molestation occurs, 2 years ago in a devon nursery by a woman! :( and a schoolfriend of mine was molested nearly 30 years ago at a very "naice" school. It's a shame you've had such negative experiences with daycare, I'm very happy with ours - themed months, trips to the children's farm etc., etc.

Natation thanks for correcting me, I wrongly assume scandinavian countries are like all european countries.

I think in that study the UK is unfortunatly behind nearly all european countries in literacy and maths.

If memory serves, in NL children start school on the day after their 4th birthday. At least that is what mine did. It meant that in the class there was always someone new (I dont think I ever saw the teacher without a child on her knee!). On the other hand it meant that there was never a whole class full of new children.

Reading/writing is learnt later but the early years are spent learning the fine motor skills. IME by the time literacy lessons start for real the children are ready.

We found the healthcare very good. On the whole the Dutch attitude is very robust. ABs arent handed out except if really needed. Our experience was that if you really needed it then the system was excellent. People who pop into the doctor for reassurance tend not to like the system so much!

Whether you think NL is good or bad will depend both on your own experience and your own expectations. We loved it and DD1 wants to go back for a year to study.

OP, if you do end up in Amsterdam and you're looking for daycare I can totally recommend this:

www.kidsenzo.nl/centrum-home.html

It looked a bit more like an Elle Decoration shoot than a daycare, but the staff were really lovely. I can also recommend great midwives (unlike the UK you choose where you want to go) and hospitals. I've also heard of a great school in Centrum, although we didn't get that far unfortunately.

Oh just thought of another ace thing about the Netherlands. Good coffee.

Worth emigrating for!

So what is a typical price for a full time creche place in Amsterdam, 7.30 to 18.30? In Brussels, unless on a low income and you manage a place in a public creche, it's around ?450-?600 per month, with a few expat marketed creches which can cost up to ?800 a month.

Sorry thick me, it's PISA report. Here we are, Netherlands in 10th place in the world, UK in 25th place. I know there are statistics and more statistics, but as the world's most comprehensive survey of educational standards in school age children, it's hard to ignore these statistics.

www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf

natation - I'm sure Amsterdam will be more expensive than where I am, but, if both parents are working you are entitled to a tax rebate of 6.65 (I think!) an hour just slightly over the number of hours the "least working" parent works. This works out for us with my husband working pt and my eldest in creche 3 days a week of a cost to me of 270 a month. To have both boys ft in creche we'd be looking at approx. 5-600 a month as it works on a sliding scale and the 2nd child is much cheaper.

I don't think there's any way in hell we'd get 100 hours a week creche for 125 euros a week in the UK.

If however one of the parents is ft SAHM then you get feck all help - I suppose they figure you're at home anyway - although that doesn't protect the parents' sanity!

So Alpine Pony doesn't pay much different where she is at to what you'd pay in Brussels. If you're a Belgian tax payer (EU and NATO civil servants pay no Belgian taxes and they make up a fair share of the population of Brussels), then you're getting about ?100 a month in tax rebates, so full time 5 day week creche places come down to ?350 to ?500 per month

I'm just wondering if anywhere in the UK is able to find a nursery from 7.30 to 18.30, 5 days a week, that's 55 hours per week usually 50 weeks a year, for between £275 and £393 per month (current exchange rates)?

Thalitsa, I have PMd you

Natation I'm looking at daycare in the UK now for my son. If he was full time, it would cost me £215 a week for every week of the year. £931 a month in other words. And that wasn't a smart nursery at all, it was a bog standard one in Brighton...

That's 8.00 till 8.00 so for an hour less per day. It includes all food, but not nappies / sunscreen.

Quite a big difference no?

God damn, life in the UK really is shit isn't it? If it wasn't for friends and family I'd be off like a rocket (again). The quality of life here (not just cost of living, I mean things like healthcare, education, general aggro, the attitude of people you meet, culture etc) just doesn't compare to our nearest European neighbours at all.

OP, if I were then I'd go to the NL again first choice, followed by Sweden second (better public services but too cold to go out for 6 months of the year!).