I would be a bad mum... if I still lived in Germany! Or: differences in traditions and guidelines

[dodi1978]

I am German, but have lived in the UK for 10 years. In fact, I had somehow acquired a husband, a house and a baby at pretty much exactly 10 years after arrived on an Easyjet flight with one suitcase . Said baby is now almost eight months old.

But that's not relevant here...

What is relevant is the fact that I am a terrible mum! Yes I am! At least if I am judge myself against German guidelines on weaning.

In the UK, the three rules seem to be:

1. Start around six months of age.
2. Avoid salt and sugar.
3. Don't give honey and nuts (ok, and a couple of other things, but the list is small).

And then, there is of course BLW vs. purees etc.

In Germany, BLW seems to be something that nobody has ever heard of. Even friends who have had babies recently seem to be utterly puzzled when I mentioned that some parents don’t give their baby any purees at all.

I’m doing a mixture of purees and finger food, having the little one eat what we eat whenever possible. But according to German guidance, I seem to have got it wrong, because, apparently, babies should have

• A potato – vegetable – meat – puree at lunchtime
• A milk – cereal – broth in the evening
• And a cereal – fruit broth in the morning

Ahem, fail!!! My pancakes with blueberry compote in the morning (which we only have occasionally, by the way) just don’t pass muster.

There are all kinds of other rules and guidelines as well, e.g. that that you should add rapeseed oil (no olive oil before one year!) to certain foods and how much and, oh yes, no yogurt before 10 months (fail!) etc. etc.

Sometimes, dear MNers, I am glad I am living in the UK! I don’t do well with rigid rules. Even the Pampers website has completely different guidance on weaning, when you look at the UK and the German version.

But this made me think… if you are from another country, or have raised a child in another country, what differences have you noticed in the guidance given and in the practice around birth, food, sleep, toilet training etc. as compared to the UK?

I am just asking this out of interest! It’d be great to hear your stories!

English living in the US, at first NYC and now in commuter territory.

In NYC, you either:

Have an elective c-section.
Pump and monitor the number of ounces of milk your baby is getting, or else breastfed with the assistance of a gigantic feeding tent. If breastfeeding, 12 months is the general goal and not the 6 months more common in the UK.
Sleep train using controlled crying at twelve weeks. Ferber is still the sleep training bible of choice.
Buy every contraption known to man to get your child to sleep in a crib.
Absolutely 100% use a "paci" (dummy).
What the hell is baby-led weaning?
What the heck does a midwife do?
Enroll them in baby classes for music/gym etc. from a young age.
Send yourself insane by applying for a dozen preschools for the "2s Program" (preschools which have a lower acceptance rate than Harvard University).

Or you live downtown or in Brooklyn and:
Co-sleep for many years
Breastfeed for many years
Knit all your kids' clothes
Plan to unschool or homeschool
Encapsulate your placenta

Connecticut is much more like type one NYC parent. Very conventional, with parents calling their paediatrician for the slightest thing (no-one goes to a GP for their kids). I am considered quite odd for not having my baby on a schedule, for not using a pacifier, and for having used a midwife rather than an OBGYN.

Norway:
Mothers stay in the maternity ward until breastfeeding is well established (if they want to). An extra day or two is no problem.

Babies and children well into school age wear wool underwear for at least half of the year

Not wearing a hat is a bad thing, even in summer

Babies sleep outside, at least down to minus 10 degrees

It is normal to sleep with your windows open at night, even in winter.

Children do not die if they are left at home alone. OK to pop out and leave children at home for a short time from about age 6-7

After school care available until year 4 (age 10). After that children are home alone until parents get home from work.

Knives are tools, not weapons. Children learn to use them at nursery. Axes too.

Children have rain clothes and snow suits and are expected to be outside several hours a day at nursery, even before they can walk. Indoor playtime due to bad weather is an unknown concept. They are expected to keep a set of rain clothes at school.

Nursery playgrounds have rocks and trees. Children climb them, and survive.

Nurseries and schools can take children outdoors without filling out risk assessment paperwork

Breast feeding is the done thing. BF in public is normal.

10 weeks of maternity leave has to be taken by the father, or you lose it.

Children are much less micro-managed than in the UK. Parents just let them get on with things to a greater extent.

Oh... agree with the cod liver oil and obligatory weaning porridge mentioned by a pps

I have obviously been living in Norway so long I had forgotten these might seem wierd.

I was in Romania when mine were babies. Baby rice came with instructions of how to make it up to add to a bottle. Baby food jars (Hipp) came aged "from 9 weeks". Lots of different herbal teas were given to babies - eg fennel tea for colic or wind. We had a honey pharmacy that used to give you different honey depending on the illness. Gripe water had alcohol in it (oh what blessed luck!) and would be made up for you sometimes by the pharmacist.

You had to dress your baby in a snow suit all year round. A hot summer's day with your baby in a pram with a cotton dress and a sun hat, and all the grannies would stop you and tell you off - your baby was cold, would not grow properly, would not be healthy and needed more layers.

Tiny babies were swaddled to make them sleep better.

Sunnysummer I kind of agree with the overdressing in Japan, but on the other hand, they always have the baby's feet bare (so they can control their temperature better)

also in Japan, during pregnancy, you are often VERY strictly monitored about weight gain and get told off for putting too much on.
Conversely, some things that are no-no's in the UK, like eating raw fish, are positively encouraged here, because sashimi is low-fat, high-protein.
Always have to cover your tummy when pregnant - there is a special belly warmer that you have, which you take to the local shrine to have blessed at 5 months or so.
always have to wear socks, even in the summer when it is BOILING hot.

Interesting about Ireland being obsessed with teething - in Japan, teething isn't even a "thing". There is no word for it, no-one thinks your baby is crying because of its teeth coming through - apparently, it just causes the gums to itch a bit, not painful at all. They recommend frozen washcloths as a chewing toy (wet a cloth, squeeze it out, put in freezer, give hard cold cloth to baby to chew on).

Also here in Japan, out and about, I see more babies being held - i.e. not in a pram, not in a sling, just in dad's arms as they walk around the supermarket.

By the time of primary school (starts at age 6), the kids are walking to school by themselves. Famously, if you are Tokyo, you see tiny school children, with enormous backpacks, running through the underground stations to catch their tube train to school!

Great thread!

one more thing - far from being spoonfed, Japanese children are encouraged to start using chopsticks early. They even have kids chopsticks with easy to use grip function

Good thing in Japan is most ladies toilet cubicles have a small fold-out seat in the corner for you to put your young child in when you are using them.
DH told me you aren't supposed to cut your baby's hair until 1 year old or they won't speak.

Eurotrashgirl - Seattle area, pretty crunchy and one of the most highly educated parts of the US.

YY tanterose my DH walked an hour to his school all through elementary. It was normal then for kids to accept lifts home from strangers, too.

I now want to live in Norway.

I am British but live in the Czech Rep. Quite a lot of differences I've found.
Most baby girls have their ears pierced. When asked why mine didn't I said I didn't like it. Her first gift from inlaws was earrings.
Temperatures taken anally when she was a baby. I hated it and it made feel very weird.
I didn't give birth here but homebirths are virtually unheard of.
Doctors and nurses generally seem bossier and more brusque although that could just be my take on things.
We live in a small village where I have seen people on scooters with a small child sat infront of them with no helmet on. I see kids in front seats and not in car seats regularly. There seems to be some odd belief that there can't possibly be a car crash or accident in our quiet village.
Weirdly though, in the boiling hot 30 degree plus summer heat you see babies wearing wooly hats. My father in law went mental at the sight of my sockless baby during the boiling hot summer.
Funnily enough though, my Dad used to always go mad about the wet hair and he was a Yorkshireman. It 'gives you pneumonia'.

About overdressing: I don't think there is such thing as overdressing. The perception of hot/cold is def cultural. If you are used to tough it out, then of course people from different countries will appear as overdressed.

On the other hand, as an Italian, I used to at so many Brits for moaning in heat waves, when it was never hotter than 26 degrees!

On the whole I would say that the USA is more of a child and youth centred culture while Germany is an adult centred culture. When I arrived in Germany that is what first struck me - Wow I am in the land of the Grown-Ups! It was quite a relief.

Interesting that although there is great emphasis in Germany on your children being indendepent at a young age, once they get through secondary level and are in college/university/apprenticeships parents are still financially responsible for them. It is normal to have grown adult children still living at home way into their twenties.

Despite a more structured and disciplined lifestyle I would say German children have more personal freedom than those in the USA and UK. Still considered a very safe society by its citizens, German children can wander at will around their neighborhood and in our case the enormous woods behind our village.

Just thought of a few more.
Boys in tights is very common. I found it weird at first but winter here is very cold so it makes sense.
Sadly, for me anyway, smacking is the norm, even for very small children. I find it hard to make friends with people as most of them smack their kids and it makes me angry. I was told by someone that people here think British kids are spoilt because they're not smacked!
Five year olds play out alone or walk to a friend's alone, which I find shocking. Kids start school at six and often walk home from there alone or with a friend.
Some things are a bit like my own nineteen seventies childhood. I think the better summers do mean kids can be a bit more outdoorsy, which is nice.

Germans are obsessed with draughts and the fact that moving from different changes in air temperature will immediately make you sick. A very close German friend when she found out we had air-conditioning in our house in America asked if we weren't constantly getting sick from moving between cold air inside and hot air outside? She explained how while on holiday at LakeConstance/Boedensee they had an air-conditioned cottage and immediately all fell ill.

However this doesn't seem to apply if you rush from the indoor warm pool to the hot pool outside on a winter's day and then immediately into the sauna and then back into the hottub at your local German swimming pool complex. Strange.

Everyone rides bikes including children, very healthy. The same society has machines selling cigarettes on the streets accessible to all age groups. Not uncommon to see Germans smoking a fag while riding their bike on the way to the Spa.

I went to a small park when in Hungary a few years ago, and there was a group of children who looked to be about 5 years old playing, while their two teachers sat on a bench talking. Some of the children even went outside the park. When it was time to go, the two teachers simply stood up and called for the children to follow them. No head counts. There were a few stragglers running to catch up. The teachers would have been sacked in the UK, but it all looked very relaxed.

Fascinating reading and the melon rule resonates with me. I grew up in Central America and melon eating after the sun sank halfway below the horizon was discouraged because of old fears regarding Malaria. It used to be believed that Malaria resulted from being out in the cold night air, especially the air around certain crops grown in sheltered areas.

You can see the same belief in the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories. Pa gets a craving for Melon and Ma warns him that he will develop 'Fever N Ague' as a consequence.

Southern Italy was decimated in parts by Malaria (Matera especially) and so it is not surprising that these customs and beliefs prevailed.

That is true, HoneyandRum, about the fag machines. And the draught thing. Germans are hilarious. As are the Brits.

The one thing that has struck me here is how stupid we are about letting our kids walk to school alone or in little groups. The roads around me are identical to how they were when I was 6, yet if I let the DCs walk to school along at that age as I did in 1974 I would be considered unhinged. I wish we could change that. I also wish it was acceptable to leave children home from a younger age. I think we rather baby our offspring here and they become needy and reliant. I think the US is an extreme manifestation of this, as there seem to be no proper adults in the entire country IMVHO.

German nightclubs are the best Coil, I agree.

German children appear to use suppositories at quite an age. Mu niece does and she is ten. Gave me quite a start when she presented her bare rump for insertion when she had a headache!

In Switzerland, the nursery who catered for 3 and 4 year olds, would at the end of the session simply open its doors and let the children out. Many of the children walked hom alone. And if you didn't let your child do that, then you simply could never be late. All the local mums thought this was normal.

You are not wrong BoffinMum, when the financial crisis hit in 2009 there were headlines saying "Where were the Grown-ups?" - everyone assuming someone has to be sensible/boring and be in charge but no one wants to do it if it's not fun and/or high status.

For me, being able to get married at Disneyland is the perfect manifestation of what is wrong with US society.

I used to go on the rickety anarchic old bus to school in Central America aged five by myself with my bags, a rolled up tortilla and piece of chile dowsed corn clutched in hand and have a lovey bowl of coffee on the platform with all the other five year olds! The only thing missing was a fag in the other hand