Help Me Understand... Why American Kids Need to Be in Bed by 8pm?
Help Me Understand... Why American Kids Need to Be in Bed by 8pm?
A new occasional feature in which I pose to all of you a question to which I genuinely don’t know the answer.
One of the things I’m excited about with this space is to turn it into a real community. And that means that I don’t just want to pontificate at you; I want to hear from you. Paying subscribers can of course comment on all of my articles and interviews, and I will try to jump into the comments myself as often as feasible. But from time to time, I will invite all of you, collectively, to help me think through some genuine intellectual puzzle. Many of these puzzles will be about straightforwardly political or economic questions. But this inaugural Help Me Understand is about a cultural difference that’s been nagging at me for a long time: why parents in southern Europe think about their children’s bedtime so differently than parents in North America.
On an experimental basis, I am inviting everyone, including free subscribers, to comment on this article! Let’s see how it goes. But I reserve the right to use the “no asshole” rule applied by Sam Harris: Be nice to each other. Engage in good faith. You can express robust disagreement in polite terms. If I get the sense that you’re stinking the place up, you’ll get banned—sorry.1
A few nights ago, I went to dinner in the center of Grosseto, Italy. The reservation was for 8.30pm, and one of my friends brought his 8-year old daughter along to the meal. She chatted with the adults at the table for a bit, painted a couple of pictures of dogs, had a plate of pasta, and then fell asleep in her seat. When we were done with the meal, around midnight, her dad carried her home.
There is nothing unusual about this in Italy (or a host of other countries in Southern Europe, Latin America, and many other parts of the world). When I took a walk around town after dinner, well past midnight, I still saw plenty of children: walking with their parents, playing on the town’s main piazza, running through fountains. As in many other parts of the world, Italian parents believe in integrating their children into their social life. If they want to be out with family or friends late into the evening, then their children, of any age, will be along for the ride—or, like our dinner companion, fall asleep in some improvised manner.
In America—at least in the middle-class, urban or suburban America with which I’m most familiar—this is practically unheard of. In a place like New York, there are relatively few children to begin with; but what’s really striking in contrast to a place like Grosseto is that you will virtually never see young children out in public after, say, 9pm. When friends or family members gather, parents of young children either leave the kids at home or leave early in the evening. As a result, parents in America—and Britain and Canada—face a constant choice: either you decline a social occasion or you hire a babysitter, with all the expense and hassle that entails.
When I ask American parents about why they don’t just bring their kid along to a dinner among friends, it is clear that some cultural norms are at play: Patrons at a nice restaurants in the United States, for example, might be annoyed by the presence of a child in a way that the people at the table next to us in the moderately upscale restaurant in Grosseto simply weren’t. Mostly, though, American parents seem to be convinced that keeping a kid up beyond their usual bedtime on a regular basis would be irresponsible and perhaps even harmful: They believe that it is of great importance for their child to have a regular bedtime routine, and swear that the child will suffer, or at the very least be terribly ill-behaved, the next day if they aren’t in their own bed by the usual time.
So: help me puzzle through this one. Is there some price that Italian parents pay for their relaxed custom, whether a comparatively trivial one in the form of a cranky and unhappy child the next day, or even a more serious one in the form of long-term developmental difficulties? Or do the habits of Italian parents prove that American parents are just wrong about this? Can children be up late without any lasting harm, allowing their parents to enjoy a richer social life, and giving their offspring more opportunities at play and socialization?
I’m hoping to write a post at some point about moderation in traditional and social media. In the simplest form, I think it is very dangerous for the people who own or run massive social media companies, like Twitter or TikTok, to retain a right to censor users on the basis of their political point of view. But I also think that it is very healthy for self-assembling communities to be able to police what speech they allow according to rules they themselves set. Indeed, this mix of refusing to engage in platform-level moderation and empowering particular users or communities to set much more strict rules within their own spaces was, I think, one of the key strengths of Reddit—and is now one of the many things that Substack gets right.
These comments have been so much more interesting and insightful than I dared to hope! Thank you, everyone, for making this experiment a resounding success.
A few brief takeaways for me:
* Hadn't thought enough about the role that afternoon siestas / naptime play in explaining the difference.
* Geography and architecture clearly play a big role: easier to do this when it's warm out and you can sit on a terrace with a place for kids to play adjacent / have a communal space other than a mall to run around in even if you're not spending money on a meal.
* The US in general is much more age-segregated than southern Europe.
* It's a collective action problem: You won't bring your kids to a dinner party if no one else brings theirs; you'll be reluctant to bring them to a restaurant if others may see them as a nuisance, etc.
* So the question in significant part is not about how different equilibria are sustained, but rather about how they came about in the first place; a question that is much harder to answer.
Having said all of that, on the whole the comments have strengthened the hunch I had coming in. There is, I think, an American parenting culture that puts the needs of kids above those of parents, which makes the day much more exhausting for adults, and creates the need for a few hours of "alone time." In southern European cultures, the bargain between the generations is different: during the summer and on weekends, a) kids get to be up late and have fun; but b) they understand that they're not always the center of attention; and therefore c) develop better social skills of how to behave around adults. From the perspective of parents, you give up some of that evening alone time without the kids, but it is much easier to sustain a social life and you spare yourself the battle of enforcing bedtime. Sounds like a better deal to me--but I'm not a parent, so what do I know!
Thanks again to everyone who commented. We'll do these "Help me Understand" threads more often!
I have so many thoughts on this to write if not a book then at least an article. But that won't happen so here is the attempt to sum it up: it is capitalism. I raised one child in Europe until the age of 13 and had another child in the US (who will spend a year with me in Prague now at the age of 11 so we will test all my theories). When we say it is cultural I agree in general but particularly in the sense that the US culture is a very much corporate/capitalist culture. In the US, missing a couple of days of school is incredibly hard to make up and keep good grades. Schools are just like workplaces where you are expected to show up and perform equally every day (which is insane, unhealthy and impossible) and they prepare students for future corporate service. People in the US go to jail for their kid's truancy. My son had Covid, we followed the protocol and I still got a super scary letter warning me of Social Services for missing school!!! In Europe, elementary schools are not scary places. Parents don't need to volunteer and co-fund schools, kids don't require an army of tutors, and missing school is not as dramatic. I still can not get used to taking my kid to school and packing lunches even though we have changed so much (the environment makes us change more than we like to acknowledge) since we immigrated to the States. People in most of Europe can perform at work even if they go to bed after midnight. People in the States can’t. Parents in the States can’t. In the States, we are constantly sleep-deprived and hungry. Our economy is driving our behavior and consequently designs our culture. Our policies (reflected in taxes to cover - or not - education and healthcare for all) are as much affecting our behavior as they are the expression of our culture. I have to stop here because I don't have time to summarize it all, but I hope it gives a gist.