Talk to me about quality of life. UK vs USA

[ilovemydogandmrobama]

So, DD is 3 and DS is almost 2. I am American, living in the UK, but am thinking of moving back to California. Both DCs have dual citizenship, so no problem with visas etc.

What are the good points living in the USA? What do British people miss about the UK?

Well-brought up American kids have very impressive manners, and are very good at at addressing an adult as Mrs Lastname, or a familiar one as Miss Firstname.

This doesn't mean necessarily that their manners are any better than well-brought up British children. They are just more formal. British parents don't train their children to address adults as Mrs xxxx. Our kids are more likely to address a familiar adult by their first name because that is what they have been told to do, or allowed to do. Younger kids will address an adult as 'Hannah's Mummy' even face to face.

These are just different cultural references, it doesn't mean that one is superior to the other, because they are the expectation within their own society.

If you want your child to use Mr and Mrs, then teach them to do it and model the behaviour yourself. British children are very able to do this because they do it quite easily at school.

btw, carmen, i LOVE san fran area, but is vv expensive & i have only been to stay with friends whilst on holiday - no idea what living there is really like.

I've been pondering over the superficial friends label. I think this is probably a bit unfair and it definitely seems offensive to anyone on the receiving end. I made this accusation so guilty as charged.

I think what I found as an expat in the US, and as a friend-to-expats in the UK, is that British women are very empathetic to others, especially when people are needy/underdogs (like newly arrived expats). It must be the Dunkirk spirit.

When I was first in the US with children, when my son came back from school the second day, he had a note inviting us all over to tea. His classmate was British and told his mum that a new kid had arrived from England. So, immediately, we were given the complete lowdown on how everything worked. The British woman told me how I was feeling (and she was right), and she gave me tips on how to make life easier. For all the areas she somenhow knew I would be interested in and where there was no way I would know the system, she told me in advance. For example, since I had 2 LOs at home, she organised for me to join a playgroup (basically a coffee morning in someone's house, rather than a toddler group). The only way you can get invited to these things is to know someone, and so I needed the important invitation. This woman smoothed the way in so many areas because she empathised with me.

My American neighbours were very friendly. There was always a wave as they passed you on the street. We were left plates of homemade cookies on our porch, beautifully wrapped, but no personal contact with the baker. If I wanted to know something, I had to ask. No one knew what I didn't know or even had a blanket, 'if you need anything, let me know'.

As a former expat, I always take any new expats under my wing. I give them the 'let me tell you how Sainsbury's works' lesson, etc. The guidebooks are good about registering with a doctor, but not so good about more mundane things.

I just hope that all of us expats and former expats are doing our bit to make someone else's experience a lot easier. The thing about being an expat is that it is usually temporary and it is such a waste if it takes you are year to figure something out. It is so much easier if you can get off the ground running and for that, you need to rely on other people.

kickass,

I have no personal experience of the Bay Area, but DH had a job interview there and it was a toss up between relocating permanently or returning to London.

For a higher level job in the Bay Area, he would have earned about 80% of his UK salary, and the house prices were on par with London.

From the research I did, it looked like a lovely place, especially if you like the outdoors, with the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other. I just didn't think it would be such great fun without the cash to back it up.

As Expat says, everywhere is great when you have plenty of cash.

Hi Sofia - good to see you haven't left Mumsnet completely, and that you still post from time to time.

How would you compare life in London to life in NYC?

Am wondering if part of the 'flaw' in these comparisons is perhaps people are comparing London (and it's suburbs) to life in suburban America....which is very different.

You are spot-on, Earlybird. No one really compares like for like.

London is both good and bad. Good for its vibrancy, cultural diversity, opportunities, but bad for house prices, traffic congestion and pollution. It is very personal whether good parts trump the US experience, our the US place trumps the bad parts.

The other thing about making a move, is that you only really do it if it is going to be better. You wouldn't do it if it were worse.

By SofiaAmes Mon 04-Jan-10 15:15:45

That's the US in a nutshell, MNers. It's actually very dog eat dog. The idea of self sufficiency and poverty being somehow your own fault or even a curse from God is very strong and the social security net is a demeaning joke, administered by the same kind of bureaucrats who treat you rudely and unkindly in the Post Office, passport control, driving busses, etc.

Even the Veterans Administration is like something out of Dickens.

Sofia, you are a Republican, right?

What happens to older people who have been "irresponsible" and haven't worked at high paying jobs in corporate America and retired with a huge pension? They can fall back on the tender mercies of their county health system, which contracts out their care to fourth rate nursing homes, where they are housed with violent, able-bodied mentally ill people who also have nowhere else to go. There they are raped, assaulted and robbed by the criminals, mistreated and neglected by the fourth-rate staff, and forgotten.

Riven, northern VA sounds so like the small southern/midwestern city where my exILs live, I couldn't believe it.

mvemjsunp your post about the early expat experience could have been written by me. I got the barge pole treatment for ages, until oldest DC started school. There's no 'popping in' or 'dropping around' to other people's houses for a cuppa.

The only bright point I found was the education system -- I especially liked the delaying of formal lessons until 5 or 6, but this is something that actually serves to create and then widen the huge gap between children whose parents care enough and have the time and resources and education to spend their children's early years exposing them to informal educational opportunities, while the children of those not so fortunate have a huge gap to make up when they finally start school. Most never do.

Local taxes pay for local schools a prosperous area will have excellent public (state) schools with marvellous facilities for sports, music, art, drama, computers, extracurricular activities the list goes on. Areas without a strong local tax base go without all of these things.

I'm so glad I no longer live in a place where being poor is seen as a personal failing to be punished by being treated like less of a person than someone who is not, for whatever reason.

If that attitude isn't Dickensian, I don't know what is.

The lack of compassion is something I see as a huge failing in my countrymen.

I find it shameful, in fact. It's embarrassing.

I agree, math!

There are so many great things about the UK, with the NHS being right at the top. Both DCs have used the local Children's Hospital and have had great treatment.

I absolutely appreciate it, but at the same time, it's difficult being in a country without family. I thought I would miss it when the DCs were babies, but now they are 3 and (almost) 2, find I miss the family network.

Just feel that it's now or never. Kids haven't started school, so wouldn't be cruel to uproot them. Mom is about to retire, so would be more available etc

Yet there is this dark cloud that if it goes horribly wrong, there is no safety net and that's quite scary...

That's too scary for me, ilove.

It really is.

Because I've been on that short end of teh stick and it wasn't because I was lazy, feckless and irresponsible.

I can't take that risk with kids in tow as well. Just can't.

Especially the healthcare thing.

My parents (Republicans) don't get it and never will.

Well, that's how it is.

ILMD Can you get your mom to retire to the UK? Or come to visit loads?

One thing that keeps me from feeling too bad about being here is that my mom comes over twice a year. And I know that the thing sureest to make me seriously plan to move back is if she weren't fit enough to travel and/or we didnt have the time/money to make regular trips.

'ILMD Can you get your mom to retire to the UK? '

Unless the person has at least £1m liquid assets and £750,000 to invest in the UK, then US citizens can't retire here.

There used to be a visa for retired people of independent means, but it's no longer in existence.

I can sort of see why, they can be a big strain on the NHS.

My mother is an EU national by descent (her mother), and she does visit often enough.

My dad is getting unfit to travel.

Still couldn't move back, though, due to healthcare/insurance system there.

Really, math? I know plenty of people who retired w/o money and when the time came, had to go to nursing homes. None of the nursing homes contained violent or mentally ill people; anyone like that is usually housed in a psychiatric facility.

mathanxiety, yes, I am a Republican (and voted tory in the uk). Not sure what that has to do with anything. But if you think it makes my personal opinions or reflections on life in the uk vs. the usa any less valid, I'm sorry you harbor such prejudices.
In answer to some of your comments....the rude public bureaucrats exist everywhere. I have been abused by bureaucrats in the UK, Italy and the USA on an equal opportunity basis. My very very british mil lives a miserable existence on her uk £75 a week pension (or something equally pitiful). In comparison, my parents in the usa who live on state govt pensions and a combo of pension health coverage and medicare in the usa live a very comfortable life.
I have to agree that 2 weeks holiday a year is not enough, BUT by the same token, my quality of work (and home) life is so much better in the usa than in the uk, that I don't really feel the need for that extra time off. My ability to function in everyday life with a job and 2 children is so much easier in Los Angeles than it was in London, that I am just so much less stressed in general.
And to your point about "local taxes" paying for schools. It's really a misconstrued point. For the most part schools are funded by the federal government on an equal basis. My kids' school which has a cachement area that includes both a lower income hispanic neighborhood and an upper middle class white neighborhood gets about half the funding that a school in a poor neighborhood gets. The difference is what the parents are able to raise privately for the school. The school in the poor neighborhood gets extra federally to make up for the extra "help" that the kids might need. At the end of the day I am able to send my children to their local state school where they get a good education and a socioeconomic and racially mixed group of peers. Where we lived in West London, my choices were not so good. As an atheist, I could not send my kids to the best local school, or even non-local. The best I could hope for was a mediocre state school at a great distance, or a private school at great expense where they would be exposed to rich white kids and mostly nothing else. Ok time for bed. Happy to add more later.

I think that one thing to bear in mind is that the culture and the systems vary hugely across the US.

We went from London to NYC and in many ways things were very similar (one big city to another). Lots of diversity, huge variation in short distances (slums to millionaire mansions, and lots of different ethnic communities). But I would totally agree about the need to have plenty of money in the US. Our apartment in the US cost more than our house rented for in the UK, and we were very financially precarious really. But that was more to do with emigrating, which is hugely expensive and disruptive.

The health thing was an issue for me, the parochialism when it came to the news, TV in general being really quite dire, the amount of politics everywhere - from local politicians sponsoring and handing out leaflets at fairs, to writing to the school about small things they had enabled - it just felt very corrupt to me. The cost of food (but not eating out), really nasty bread (although once we had a breadmaker that ceased to be an issue), the weird design of highways to go right through most parks, oh and the truly truly scary driving.

But we found people really genuinely friendly, we met people with roots from around the world, had some great food, enjoyed the crazy rain, found it fun to see all the cultural references, and the kids had a great school (although very high pressure with a vast amount of homework).

Then they threw us out when dh lost his job (and the job insecurity and lack of anything like even basic respect for workers seriously sucks).

Now we live in BC, and I really enjoy life. I think a lot of that is the West Coast attitude. We found from meeting Americans from different parts of the States and traveling through (we drove from NYC to BC, so right across the top of the States) that there was just so much variation, depending on the history, geography and cultural background of places. But if you come from California I guess you know (mostly) what to expect.

You are not comparing like-for-like.

In the UK, the state pension is a safety net. That is what it is meant to be and what it was always designed to be. There is an expectation that Britons will make provision for their own retirement, just as there is that expectation in the US.

You parents have made that provision and your MIL has not. It is not a reflection on the relative pension schemes as your MIL seems to have opted out entirely.

It's good that you are happy, but so are others. Don't trash them.

mvemjsunp, I agree, it's not nice to trash people (not quite sure who I am supposed to have trashed, but happy to apologize in advance for any offense I may have given). I think that this discussion is much more productive if one sticks to discussing personal experiences of quality of life in the uk and us as requested by op. I do however feel that some misconceptions and untruths about the treatment of the elderly and the poor in the USA needed to be corrected.

It is however true, that quality of life, life style and basically everything in between varies greatly from one us state to another (sort of like from one european city to another).

A friend of mine just posted on livejournal that she has a 3 week wait to be seen at the 'poverty clinic' with a severe cough. The US really isn't all that kind to the poor. Why are there so many people standing on street corners with their hands out? Literally every intersection around here has someone standing there. I find it really upsetting.

There's a lot of great things about America but the extreme brand of capitalism here is inherently selfish.

Ilove - I can completely understand why you would want family about. Especially if your mum is about to have free time to see the kids and play and be there. Do you mean no safety net as in there is none in the US with healthcare etc, or none here because of lack of family fall back? Sorry, being dense here!

Yeah, meant the help available if everything goes wrong. There is such a 'can do' mentality in the US which is great most of the time, and while I have never claimed benefits, mainly because I have been fortunate and lucky to be in a position where I have always been able to work, what happens if I can't?

A friend of mine had a really good job at a university, but needed to come off long term pain killers which was more difficult than she thought it would be, and it took her a couple of years to get off completely and manage her pain.

So, meanwhile, most of her colleagues are being made redundant. She is 'safe' because she is off on disability and gets her health care paid for, but is too scared to go back to work as she will be made redundant, and subsequently lose her health cover. As she has pre existing conditions, it would be about $1,000 a month for her health cover alone.

But, then again, I really don't want health insurance to rule my life to such an extent that I cannot be with my mother, and other family because of it, in which case Mr Capitialist has won