The Happiest
Kids in the
World

Bringing Up Children
the Dutch Way

Rina Mae Acosta and
Michele Hutchison

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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www.penguin.co.uk

Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Doubleday

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison 2017
Illustrations by Alyana Cazalet

Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the experiences and recollections of the authors and interviews with other parents. In some cases names of people and identifying details have been changed to protect the identity of others. The authors have stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects, the contents of this book are true.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473540569

ISBNs 9780857523853 (hb)
9780857523860 (tpb)

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Rina’s Family

Michele’s Family

Introduction

TWO TODDLERS HAVE just chased each other to the top of a climbing frame and are jostling to get down the slide first. Their mothers are lost in conversation on a nearby park bench, sipping their lattes and feeling the weak sun on their faces. In the distance, a dog barks and a little boy ambles along on his balance bike, trailed by his grandfather who is pushing a buggy. A gang of older children in tracksuits comes racing along the bike path, laughing and joking, hockey sticks dangling dangerously close to their wheels. They overtake a young mum, who is cycling more slowly, balancing a baby in a seat on the front of her bike and a toddler on the back. A group of girls is playing piggy-in-the-middle on the grass, their joyful shrieks filling the air. Not far away, some boys are perfecting their skateboarding moves. None of the school-age children are accompanied by adults.

This happy scene isn’t from a movie. It’s just a regular Wednesday afternoon in springtime in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, a scene that’s enacted all across the Netherlands every day.

In 2013, a UNICEF report rated Dutch children the happiest in the world. According to researchers, Dutch kids are ahead of their peers in childhood well-being when compared with twenty-nine of the world’s richest industrialized countries. The United Kingdom came sixteenth and the US ranked twenty-sixth, just above Lithuania, Latvia and Romania – the three poorest countries in the survey. Children from the Netherlands were in the top five in each of the categories assessed: Material Well-being; Health and Safety; Education; Behaviours and Risks; and Housing and Environment. In fact, the Dutch scored highest for Behaviours and Risks, as well as for Education (a category in which the UK came twenty-fourth). When it came to Dutch children rating their own happiness levels, more than 95 per cent of them considered themselves happy. Several other research surveys have likewise highlighted the positive benefits of growing up in Holland – Britain’s Child Poverty Action Group and the World Health Organization, for example. The UNICEF report was a follow-up to one conducted in 2007, in which the Netherlands was first heralded as a prime example of childhood prosperity. The UK and the US ranked in the two lowest positions.

In addition, new research also suggests that Dutch babies are happier than their American counterparts. After examining the temperamental differences between babies born in the US and in the Netherlands, Dutch babies were found to be more contented – laughing, smiling and cuddling more – than American babies. Dutch babies were also easier to soothe, while American babies displayed more fear, sadness and frustration. Psychologists attribute this discrepancy to the different cultural mores of child-rearing in the two countries. It’s quite astonishing to us that no one seems to be making more of a fuss about this.

As an American mum and a British mum, both of us married to Dutchmen and raising our kids in the Netherlands, we’ve found it hard not to notice how happy Dutch children are. The scene we described above should give you an idea why: Dutch children enjoy freedoms denied to children in the countries we come from, and thrive on them. Here are some of the things that set Dutch children apart from children in the UK and the US:

Childhood over here consists of lots of freedom, plenty of play and little academic stress. As a consequence, Dutch kids are pleasant to be around. Once you get past their blunt communication style, they are sociable, friendly, chatty, refreshingly honest and straight to the point. Dutch children are helpful, quick to take the initiative, and they don’t demand the constant attention of grown-ups. They know how to entertain themselves.

When we say that we’ve noticed that children here are happy, we don’t mean they are constantly leaping for joy, bouncing off the walls and spontaneously bursting into Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’. Dutch children are self-aware and confident, and are able to foster meaningful ties with family members, build loyal friendships, find love and discover their place in the world. This is the kind of happiness children experience when their parents listen to and respect their opinions.

Such an upbringing produces the most confident, responsible and respectful teenagers you may ever come across. Dutch teenagers don’t rebel. They don’t possess that posturing arrogance, but rather a mature self-assurance. Even though it is culturally acceptable to have romantic sleepovers, the Netherlands also boasts one of the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy in the world. These well-adjusted children grow up prepared to deal with the trials and tribulations of adult life.

The assertion made by seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke that a child is born a blank slate that will be shaped by its environment permeates the Anglo-Saxon approach to child-rearing. Some say that this has led to a new normal of hyper-aware, highly opinionated and overly engaged parents. Their children, pressurized to perform, pushed to conform, wired for success – are not allowed to develop at their own pace. English and American parents these days are much more engaged with their children than were parents of previous generations, and are inclined to believe that everything a child does requires vigilant adult supervision. The defining feature of modern-day parents in the UK and the US is anxiety: our friends back home are running themselves ragged; every parenting decision is freighted with doubt, second thoughts and guilt. Why aren’t Dutch parents weighed down by this anxiety? Why is it that they don’t show the over-anxious, helicoptering behaviour so common elsewhere?

The Netherlands has a reputation for being a liberal country with a tolerance of sex, drugs and alcohol, yet beneath this lies a closely guarded secret: the Dutch are actually fairly conservative people. At the heart of Dutch culture is a society of home-loving people who place the child firmly at the centre. Parents have a healthy attitude towards their kids, seeing them as individuals rather than as extensions of themselves. They understand that achievement doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness, but that happiness can cultivate achievement. The Dutch have reined in the anxiety, stress and expectations of modern-day parenting, redefining the meaning of success and well-being. For them, success starts with happiness – that of their children and themselves.

The Dutch parenting style hits that elusive balance between parental involvement and benign neglect. It is authoritative, not authoritarian. The Dutch believe in good old-fashioned family values, coupled with a modern appreciation of a child’s intrinsic worth and a respect for women’s lives outside motherhood. The norm in the Netherlands is simplicity: families tend to choose simple, low-cost activities and take a back-to-basics approach.

Dutch society has fought for and achieved an enviable work–life balance. As the part-time-work champions of Europe, the Dutch work on average twenty-nine hours a week, dedicate at least one day a week to spending time with their children, and pencil in time for themselves, too. You won’t find a Dutch mother expressing guilt about the amount of time she spends with her children – she will make a point of finding time for herself outside of motherhood and work. Sturdy, windswept and self-assured, these mums don’t start to stress about getting back into shape the minute they leave the hospital with their new baby. And Dutch mums don’t do for their children things they are capable of doing themselves – they believe in encouraging independence at the appropriate age. They are confident and calm. There’s none of that ‘mompetition’ or mommy guilt you see in the UK and the US.

Dutch fathers are not afraid of looking like sissies – they take an equal role in child-rearing and household chores. They look after their kids on their days off and help put the little ones to bed. You’re just as likely to see a dad pushing a pram or wearing a baby-carrier as a mum. And when a child has a temperature, for example, a Dutch mum and dad will take turns to stay at home with the child, with most employers showing understanding and leniency. Dutch dads walk tall, talk straight and don’t care if us expats take the piss out of their crispy gelled curls, red trousers or yellow anoraks.

In contrast, we see British and American parents feeling constantly challenged and unsettled by their own unrealistic expectations and by other people’s opinions. There’s an assumption that children need all the time, money, resources and attention a parent can (superhumanly) provide in order to give them a head start in life. This assumption seems to have become ingrained within UK and US culture. If mums don’t live up to the ideal of the self-sacrificing, Pinterest-savvy, bending-over-backwards Mommy, society is quick to wave a finger. But since when did being a good parent mean making child-rearing a life-defining pursuit? When did we come to accept that modern parenthood should be all work and no fun?

At the very crux of the judgemental bandwagon is the way society measures and compares parenting expertise through the academic accomplishments of our children. We are familiar with the middle-class parenting clichés of our own countries: ergonomic baby carriers, fancy strollers, organic snacks, exclusive private schools, sports clubs, music lessons … The school playground has been transformed into a parenting battleground. A friend in New York described the back-stabbing rugby scrum to secure a nursery-school place on the Upper East Side. Parents and three-year-olds have to go through a rigorous selection process, and being rejected is worse than being left at the altar. There’s even such a thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ birthdays, with conception timed to ensure that the child will be the eldest (and, the argument goes, therefore the most intellectually advanced) in the class. Competitive motherhood reaches its extreme in New York and London; from there, it permeates to other cities, to suburbs and villages. Parenting has evolved into a highly competitive, exhausting business and schooling into a war zone.

Here, however, in this small, flat Western European country, parents are doing things differently. And, as a result, they are raising some of the most contented children in the world. The German poet Heinrich Heine once joked, ‘When the world comes to an end, I shall go to Holland, for everything there happens fifty years later.’ There’s something both familiar and old-fashioned about life in the Netherlands. Dutch children enjoy a huge degree of freedom: they ride their bikes to school, play on the streets and visit friends after school, all unaccompanied. Everyone has something to contribute to the conversation at the family dinner table and families have time to do things together. Children at primary school aren’t expected to do homework, and they don’t swot for exams. It’s the kind of childhood that many of us are nostalgic for. A childhood from black-and-white photographs, old movies and Enid Blyton books.

But is this version of childhood really so old-fashioned? Or is it perhaps forward-thinking and ahead of its time? Might the Dutch have consciously clung on to this vision of childhood? And what is it about the Netherlands that has allowed its children still to experience such a carefree existence? Is this small country really so much safer than other countries?

The Netherlands is a wealthy West European country that enjoys all the conveniences of modern life and suffers the attendant First World problems, including crime, murder and child abduction. However, there is no tabloid press whipping up parental anxiety, and Dutch parents are extremely good at putting things into perspective: they appraise the level of real risk to their child and act accordingly. The Dutch even have a word for this: relativeren. It means weighing up the pros and cons and, rather than worrying about child-snatchers, paedophiles or major disasters, preparing children for more common risks, like drowning or traffic accidents, by ensuring that they can swim, ride a bike and cross the road safely.

Crucially, although average Dutch household debt is among the highest in Europe, and the country isn’t without its social problems, there is less social and financial inequality in the Netherlands than in the UK and the US. Living conditions are good, though not perfect for everyone. In the 2013 UNICEF report, the Netherlands trailed behind Switzerland, Ireland and Norway in the category Housing and Environment. Let’s not forget, the country is quite damp (a large portion of the land lies below sea-level), and seriously overpopulated. The perpetual grey skies can be downright depressing at times. It’s no utopia.

As expat mums raising our children in the Netherlands, we’ll give you the low-down on the Dutch approach to parenting. Michele, whose children are older than Rina’s, will focus on children of primary-school age and upwards; Rina on children under the age of five. Both of us have talked to parents and their children in an attempt to work out what it is that the Dutch know and their British and American counterparts have forgotten or overlooked. How do Dutch parents produce such happy kids, such pleasant teenagers? Could the answer really lie in the chocolate sprinkles they have on bread for breakfast? Is it the fact that Dutch children cycle everywhere? Is it the relaxed approach to parenting? The preference for home births? The Dutch love of dairy produce? The frequent camping holidays? The streamed secondary-school system? We’ve talked to other parents, and we’ve listened, and we’ll share with you those A-ha! moments we’ve had along the way. And we’ll do what we can to give as many tips as possible to help you to raise your children the Dutch way: happy.

1

Discovering Dutchland

Rina in Doorn, a quaint Dutch village in the woods

My investigation into why Dutch children are so happy begins at my home in Doorn, a Dutch village with a population of ten thousand situated in the middle of a national park and populated by young families, pensioners, nature lovers and those seeking a slower pace of life. It is a place where you’ll see children playing on tree-lined streets, where making delicious home-made pancakes and warm chocolate milk is considered a virtue, where families eat freshly made caramel waffles at the farmers’ market, where the air is filled with the smell of barbecue smoke in the spring and summer, and of burning logs in the fall and winter, and where the best chance of making new friends, young and old, is on a walk in the local woods. It’s also 8,816 kilometres (5,478 miles) from San Francisco – a place I called home for most of my life.

While I am connected to the filtered realities of life back in the Bay Area, thanks to my Facebook feed, Instagram notifications and Skype video dates, I’m living in a parallel universe. My parents worked their fingers to the bone on a laundry list of sacrifices; the mantra ‘we sacrificed everything for you to have a better life and a good education’ played on repeat. They set the standards for academic excellence exceedingly high, and any failure or shortcoming brought family shame and loss of face. Ensuring that my brothers and I had a happy childhood was more of an afterthought, a footnote to more pressing concerns, as my parents struggled paycheck to paycheck to send us to the local private Catholic school, to pay for the mortgage, put food on the table, give money to relatives left behind in the Philippines, and keep up with the Santoses.

Childhood, it seemed, was something to be endured rather than enjoy. Now, ironically, I am an American expat in a small Dutch village, navigating parenthood and exploring a new way to live, just like my parents, in a culture very different to my own.

It’s all because of a love-at-first-sight, transatlantic romance that started when a Dutch graduate student was, literally, dropped off at my front doorstep. My cousin Grace, who had befriended the Dutch co-ed at the University of Florida, was convinced we were meant for each other. Since I was too preoccupied pursuing a career in medical research to care, she took matters into her own hands: she brought Bram to visit me in Philadelphia, pretending it was just an off-the-cuff visit. It happened to be Bram’s last week in the United States before he headed back to Holland to finish his master’s thesis.

No one expects to fall in love at first sight. I certainly didn’t expect to open my door to a charming European who would profess to be madly in love with me just hours after our first hello. Luckily, I had enough common sense to at least give this Dutch boy a chance – from a distance of 3,721 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, of course. We had a good old-fashioned romance with a modern twist, him sending long, hand-written love letters as well as frequent emails, regular gmail chats and spontaneous phone calls. And for the first time in my life, I was honest with myself: I had to ask where my heart really lay – and it wasn’t in becoming a doctor.

He proposed in Paris and we married in San Francisco. And here I am in Holland, ten years later, living in a rented 1930s cottage in the woods, contemplating the differences between the culture of the Netherlands and the US and searching for a middle ground. Although I am very happy in my marriage, it took me a while to grow fond of life in the Low Countries. In fact, I struggled for the first seven years: the culture shock was immense, all-encompassing and unrelenting. The weather is persistently dark, rainy and cloudy, and I suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder eleven months of the year. And there were other aspects of Dutch life I didn’t like – for example, I found it difficult to accept how small everything seemed, and the way that everyone gave me advice I hadn’t asked for.

When I became pregnant with my first child, Bram Julius, I was apprehensive. I suppose ‘anxious’ is a more accurate description, really. I wanted my son to have what I hadn’t had: a happy childhood. So I bought into the perfect-mum myth, an idealized (and unrealistic) vision of motherhood that demanded I dedicate myself to my child and devote unprecedented amounts of patience and understanding to him. I devoured all the (unsolicited) advice on what to do and what not to do in pregnancy, and various contradictory parenting philosophies. I signed up for antenatal and yoga classes and meticulously studied all the developmental milestones in the first year of a child’s life. Well-meaning American friends and family showered me with flashcards, baby-sign-language tutorials, baby-led weaning manuals, Dr Seuss books and Sesame Street DVDs.

I also started debating the pros and cons of the Montessori, Dalton, Regina Coeli and Waldorf methods of nursery schooling. After all, I reasoned, my baby will only have so much time to prepare his answers before the pre-school admissions officers ask him, ‘So what have you done with the first thirty-six months of your life?’ (This is assuming we might move back to the San Francisco Bay area.)

Being an expat mother brought an unexpected kinship with other foreigners living in the Netherlands whose native language happens to be English: British, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. In any case, we’re ‘all English’, according to the Dutch. Zij is Engels (‘She is English’) is often how I’m introduced by (older) Dutch people. Intent on shaking off my feelings of loneliness and culture shock and my creeping awareness that I was turning into a desperate housewife, I started a blog, ‘Finding Dutchland’, about my experiences as an American expat mom in the Netherlands. Blogging seemed like a great way to combine my passions – writing, photography and family. It was also an honest attempt to connect with other Engels expats and a virtual portfolio of who I am. If people liked what they saw and read, perhaps they would want to be my friend.

I was slow to warm to the Dutch way of parenting. Raised on equal parts Catholic guilt and immigrant work ethic, the Dutch approach seemed a bit too easy-going, self-centred and lazy to me. I viewed with suspicion the midwife-assisted births, ideally at home and non-medicated. The Dutch didn’t send their toddlers to music lessons or on academic-enrichment programmes, or worry about getting them into the right nursery school. What was wrong with them?

A year into motherhood I stumbled upon an article claiming that Dutch children were the happiest kids in the world, according to UNICEF. How true was this? Were they really that happy?

Deeply ingrained in the American psyche is the pursuit of happiness. We strive for perfect parenting, believing that being our children’s twenty-four-hour playmates and constant supervisors will win us this coveted prize.

And an added jibe – Dutch parents were accomplishing this en masse and with a lot less effort. Maybe I just needed to calm down, and look at what the Dutch were doing. What if parenthood could actually be fun?

I became fascinated by what the parents around me were doing and started to analyse the differences between their and my approach. And I befriended the local children, who enjoyed stopping by to play with my son, the only baby on our block. One night, I decided to write my observations – ‘The Eight Secrets of Dutch Kids, the Happiest Kids in the World’, my first attempt to be part of the mommy-sphere. My blog piece went viral, resonating with parents around the world.

Today, I’m frantically preparing for Julius’s third birthday party in full Californian over-achieving mommy mode. (Since both my husband and our first son share the same name, I am going to refer to our son as Julius to avoid confusion.) Apart from Dutch relatives, the guests include expats with children of around Julius’s age. They too love the laid-back parenting philosophy here. These recovering workaholics are learning to appreciate the part-time work culture in Holland that is a viable option for even the most ambitious. And, like me, they rave about the benefits.

I’m busy with last-minute preparations – adding additional garnishes to the artisanal pizza, frying up home-made egg rolls, squeezing a bit more lime juice into the guacamole and preparing the Vietnamese beef-noodle salad. Maybe the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse paraphernalia and the dessert buffet consisting of a two-tiered fondant cake, red velvet cupcakes, chocolate truffles and Italian shortbread cookies give away the fact that I’m not a native. I try to integrate, but I am still prone to trying to be the domestic goddess.

Bram shakes his head in amusement, and my in-laws seem overwhelmed by all the effort I’ve made. My mother-in-law doesn’t understand why I’m doing so much. But I find it impossible to shake off the idea that the more time, effort and thought I put into my child’s birthday party, the more I prove my love for him. Yet it’s exhausting, and I’m not even sure my son really appreciates it. The Dutch kids’ parties we’ve been to are simple, down-to-earth affairs reserved for immediate family and maybe neighbours, where each guest gets one slice of cake and the adults sit in a circle, chatting politely for three hours while the children run around playing games.

Dutch birthdays, and most other celebrations, are more about celebrating togetherness. Our guests start by congratulating the parents and grandparents of the birthday boy, as well as the child. The Dutch expect you to congratulate everyone in the room. Needless to say, when I first came across this tradition, I found it a bit odd. Eventually, I started to appreciate this cultural idiosyncrasy. Like the custom of bringing in a treat for your classmates or treating your co-workers at the office to cake on your birthday, it’s more about giving than receiving. I like that.

My son runs up to me, and says, ‘Cake, Mama.’ It’s time for the birthday songs. The four-and-under crowd gathers round as the cake is placed before Julius. The first song is ‘Happy Birthday’, sung in English, followed by the Dutch version, Lang zal hij leven (‘Long Shall He Live’). I prefer the Dutch one, as it ends in ‘Hip hip hip, hoorah!’, and the birthday boy raises his hands in a gesture of victory.

As Julius blows out his three birthday candles, I can’t help but think to myself, ‘He’s growing up happy.’

Meanwhile, Michele is living in Amsterdam’s village metropolis …

Just as Rina and I are setting out on our journey to work out just what makes Dutch kids so happy, I have one of those days that exemplifies my new life here. It’s a bright spring day and I’m up at the allotments just outside Amsterdam’s ring road. I come here almost every weekend between April and October.

The birds are singing; one of them is calling out an insistent ‘cha-wee cha-wee cha-wee’. I’m bent double, pulling grass out of my strawberry-and-raspberry patch with a metal claw. Two metres away on the unkempt lawn, my ten-year-old son, Benjamin, and his friend Floris are helping my Dutch husband, Martijn, reassemble the trampoline that has been in storage for the winter. The two boys are working well together, putting all their strength into stretching the springs between the canvas and the frame. My eight-year-old daughter, Ina, called her best friend, Tijn, earlier this morning and set off on her scooter to play at his house.

It’s a peaceful, harmonious scene, complete with sunshine and daffodils. When the trampoline is ready, the boys take turns jumping on it. I joke about Floris’s weight, checking if he’s under the maximum the canvas can take. At eleven years old, he’s almost as tall as me, one of those strapping Dutch lads with enormous feet. My half-English son looks like a dwarf next to him. They say it’s growth hormones in the milk, but I suspect genes have more to do with it.

Two hours later, I’m still weeding. It’s a labour-intensive endeavour, and mice have dug tunnels under the plants. The Dutch are outdoors types and love their allotments. Most of them spend a lot more time at theirs than I do. There are five or six large complexes within ten minutes of my house. Unlike British allotments, which tend to feature a few rows of vegetables and a rickety shed, the Dutch go all out and build luxury cabins with solar panels, running water and gas. Since they all love camping, their allotments become mini weekend campsites, and they often spend the night. The complex is dotted with tanned pensioners sunning themselves on folding chairs, children playing with water and mud, and dedicated gardeners, headscarved and bent-backed. There is a football pitch, a sandpit and a playground for the kids and a large canteen serving beer and snacks for the adults. At weekends, there are card tournaments, bingo and sing-alongs.

Ben and Floris are taking turns to lie on their bellies across the trampoline. They talk constantly, inventing and reinventing whatever fantasy they are in – they are rockets, astronauts, swimmers, Olympic divers, acrobats; they are in a weightless world with no gravity; they have superpowers; they can do seventeen back flips; they have been kidnapped and taken to a tree hut; they somersault out of the tree hut and are back on the trampoline. They tell each other jokes, some even making fun of the right-wing extremist Geert Wilders and giggling at simple puns. Ben chatters excitedly about yesterday’s Saturday drama club, still relishing the fun he had backstage between performances.

I ask Floris whether he doesn’t have to revise today for the tests coming up at school. He looks at me in surprise. Of course not, what a peculiar thought! his face seems to suggest. The reason I enquire is because the boys are in the process of moving from primary to secondary school, and I know from Ben that Floris is on the borderline between two different streams. But neither of the boys mentions the impending exams. Nothing seems to be further from their minds. Today is Sunday, and from Tuesday to Thursday the boys will be taking their final primary-school exams, the Citos. These exams are the equivalent of the old British Eleven Plus (to select children for entry to grammar school). Except that, in the Netherlands, there is no passing or failing. The scores measure a child’s academic abilities in order to stream them into the broad range of secondary schools – from academic to technical, vocational or manual. In other words, this pivotal exam may influence the rest of a child’s life and their possible career choices.

To be honest, I have been feeling rather nervous about the Citos. Martijn and I are pretty sure our son is not going to do particularly well. Though Ben’s previous results have been good – he even skipped a grade – he is easily distracted and doesn’t perform well in multiple-choice exams. He tends just to plump for the first option that looks as if it might be right, without reading the others. In the few practice tests he’s done, he’s got most of the answers wrong! If it was up to me, I’d be revising with him and coaching him, as I would if we lived in Britain. But his teacher, Cinthya, a calm woman the same age as me – in her early forties – has specifically asked me not to.

‘You don’t want to put him under any strain,’ she cautioned, as if putting a child under any kind of pressure was the worst thing a parent could do.

It was more an imperative than a polite suggestion. And I have learned not to mess with Dutch women. These days, I don’t so much pick my battles as head for the hills. Dutch women are bigger, stronger and a lot more assertive than I am. While the men seem like gentle giants, the women are fierce. What’s more, Cinthya seemed to know what she was doing and had everything under control. So I ended up deciding, against my gut instincts, to trust her.

Ben has already handed in the list of the ten secondary schools he’d like to go to, in order of preference. When we attended the schools’ open days, he was encouraged to pick the ones he felt most comfortable at. After that, Cinthya discussed his choices with him. As parents, we were involved only as advisors, relegated to the back seat. Ben read up on the different schools and their teaching methods, discussed their reputations with older friends and looked up the distances he would have to travel.

His first choice is a very modern school with an emphasis on the liberal arts, with film studies and drama on the curriculum. His second is the old-fashioned academic gymnasium his grandfather attended, again partly because it does drama studies. Unlike his parents, our boy’s a born thesp. Even as a baby, he’d play to the crowd, putting on a show before he could even talk. In fact, Ben is a lot more interested in the school musical, in which he has a leading role – the culmination of his primary-school ambitions – than in his exams.

Martijn tells me that when he was eleven it was his Amsterdam primary school that decided which secondary he should attend. Parental preference, it seems, has never been a major influence here. This must be what people mean when they call the Netherlands ‘a child-centred society’. It’s the child who has to go to the school, after all. Sadly, American-style ‘concerted cultivation’ parenting practices are creeping into the country’s affluent pockets, and this worries me. Parents who prepare their children academically and hire private tutors have lost sight of the value of the Dutch school system, which is in favour of placing the child under minimal stress. Luckily, in my part of town, there is still more emphasis on what the child wants and what the teacher thinks best than what parents might aspire to.

In June, we’ll find out which school our son will be going to. We’re spoiled for choice – there are twenty-four that offer the type of schooling thought suitable for him. All the ones we visited looked fine to me. Trusting the child to make their own choice is a lot less stressful for the parent. A new ‘matching system’ has just been imported from New York. You pick ten schools and are guaranteed a place at one of them, or so the theory goes. The system aims to place the children in a school as close to the top of their list as possible. But it’s the first year, so we are guinea pigs.

Before, there was a lottery system. Since the places at the half a dozen most popular schools were – and still are – limited, a child would either get into their first choice of school (and most did) or go through a clearing system to find a place elsewhere. The Dutch adore lottery systems, perhaps because they rule out nepotism and favouritism. The Dutch are also oddly averse to meritocratic procedures. There are no interviews, and places are not allocated according to grades. This is alien to me, as I come from a culture where getting the highest grades is seen as a fast track to success in life. When I was a child, my fear of failing exams became all-encompassing and I began to have panic attacks. I would throw up in the loos beforehand. I remember once getting up and running out of a maths exam, my face streaked with tears. The headmaster caught up with me at the school gates.

Looking back, I can see that I internalized my parents’ ambitions for me. They had moved into the catchment area of a grammar school so that I could get the best kind of state education available. I was a good student, a high achiever, and terrified of displeasing my mother. At Ben’s age, I was also a competitive swimmer, training every day and often travelling around the country with my team mates to compete at weekends. I used to throw up in the toilets at the pools too, terrified of not improving on my personal best. My childhood was one big competition and I had to be the best every time.

When I moved to the Netherlands eleven years ago, I wasn’t thinking about schools. Thirty-seven weeks pregnant, I was planning on joining Martijn in Amsterdam for the duration of my six-month paid maternity leave, and then heading back to London and the job I loved. I was an ambitious young workaholic pursuing a career in publishing. I pictured my child going to daycare in north-west London; I’d worry about schools later. My weekend commuter marriage across the North Sea had worked fabulously so far; I assumed – naively, as it turned out – that it would work when we were parents, too. My own father had often been away working on oil rigs during my early childhood years. I figured fathers were optional in child-rearing – more fool me.

Reality soon hit when I found myself at home with a screaming baby. Looking after a baby takes up a whole lot of time and energy, and there I was, planning to return to a full-on job and the stresses of London. I started looking into the practicalities of raising my child in Amsterdam, and it was clear there was a whole stack of advantages. You could cycle anywhere in the city, so there’d be no stuffy tube trains or overcrowded, run-down buses to contend with. Dutch parents seemed laid-back, small children ran about happily – even in restaurants! My sister-in-law’s children were polite and friendly, and there was a unified state-school system, so no terrifying gulf between public and private, between the haves and the have-nots. That was a huge draw. Maybe it would be a good thing to raise my child here? I decided to bite the bullet and stay in Amsterdam.

Whenever I visited London, I’d catch up with my friends, and I soon became aware of the differences in our lives as new mothers. At first, they weren’t so huge: there were crèches and nannies in the Netherlands, too, for example. But as the children grew older and started school, it was clear that the two countries operated very differently. The Telegraph recently estimated that, in the UK, it costs £600,000 to privately educate two children from nursery age to A-levels and then send them to university for three years. We could never have afforded that, and neither can many of my London friends. One option for them is to move into the catchment area of a good state school, and some of them have done that.

My friend Helen, who lives in Surrey and now commutes into central London, told me she feels guilty about not having been able to provide the ‘best education’ for her children. ‘If you don’t go private, you haven’t done literally everything you could,’ she confided. She looked at me a little enviously when I said that in the Netherlands, the only option is the state-school system. Private schools generally only exist for expats, to wit, the British School, the American School, and the International School.

My friend Selma, who lives in affluent Knightsbridge, complained that her children’s private school expected too much of its pupils. The headmistress had asked to speak to her about her youngest boy, saying that she was ‘afraid her son was falling behind academically’. The problem was that her five-year-old did not yet know his times tables off by heart. Selma was horrified that her son was being branded a failure at such a young age. In the Netherlands, children don’t start to learn until the age of six; until then, the focus is on structured play.

And these are just two examples. Many people in the UK have issues with schools and childcare that we just don’t experience in the Netherlands. I know it’s not comparing like with like – Amsterdam is minuscule compared with London or New York. Of course, living in a smaller city makes life with children easier, but the differences go further than being purely a matter of scale. British and American parents seem to exert much more control over their children’s lives and spend much of their scarce free time taxiing their kids around – children just aren’t allowed out on their own. But who in their right mind would let a child wander freely, with hysteria-inducing tabloids shouting out paedophile warnings virtually every day? The Dutch don’t have a gutter press, so even though there are paedophiles in the Netherlands, too, the threat is not blown up out of all proportion. Many big-city schools in the UK operate security levels similar to those you’d find in prisons. There are metal detectors at the entrance to a north London state primary school one of my friends sends his children to. This would never happen in the Netherlands. Anyone can walk into a Dutch school. This doesn’t mean there are killers wandering in; it’s that the perceived threat is kept in perspective.