Seen and Not Heard

Having spent the majority of my working life in the field of education, I have been surrounded by children for most of my adult life.  Actually, I have been surrounded by preadolescents for most of the time, and they are a species unto themselves.

Now that I am retired and doing a fair amount of travelling, I often spend some time observing the behaviors of the children I see on my travels.  I started doing this in earnest after hearing about a book written by an American mother living in France who noted how differently French children behaved in social situations as compared to her own American children. The French children, she noted, were decidedly better behaved and less complaining.

So on a recent trip to Italy, I quietly noted the behavior of the children and teens I saw around me.  These are solely my anecdotal observations:

1.  Teen agers all dress alike.  Jeans, hoodies, sneakers and backpacks are the universal adolescent uniform.  Rome, London, Stockholm, Budapest, New York City...no matter what city you are in, they all dress the same. 

2. Extreme droopy drawers are an American phenom. The Italians just seem to have too much style to let their pants hang low. The British are just too hip to look so sloppy.

3. American kids tend to misbehave on the way to and from school.  In Rome, we stayed at a tourist hotel near a transportation hub with lots of kids on their way to and from school.  They travelled in groups, but I saw no bad behavior on the streets or on the buses during our stay.  The only questionable behavior I ever noticed was in Athens when a group of Spanish teens made an offensive remark about our Greek guide, a pretty young woman.  Unfortunately for them, many of us understood Spanish; one of the gentleman on our trip, a retired gym teacher from New York, basically told them to shut up and behave themselves.  Which they quickly did.

4. Teen aged girls on class trips travel in groups of three or four and pout a lot.  Teen aged boys travel in packs and laugh a lot...everywhere.

5. Children in Europe eating at restaurants with their parents stay seated, do not swing their chairs, roll on the floor, bang on pianos, nor run around the place willy-nilly. Unfortunately, I have observed all of those behaviors, and many more, in  American restaurants, church dinners, stores, malls and cruise ships.

My over all impression is that European children are, on the whole, better behaved than American children. 

Now, how do we fix that?