'I tried parenting like the English for a week,' reveals an Anglophile mom. This mom shares how she manages to parent her child by incorporating English approaches to parenting. In the end, she has tested and proven the efficiency of the English parenting style and plan to practice it especially her family will move to England by next year.
Christie Drozdowski, a writer in Romper, greatly admires British culture. Luckily, she met an English guy when she was 16 and married him after five years. Now that they have a baby, Drozdowski wanted to adopt English parenting. In her post in Romper, she revealed how she was able to raise her daughter by taking English parenting style.
Being new to parenthood, Drozdowski does not know what English parenting is. To find out, she asked her English friends and sisters-in-law about the elements in English parenting that stood out from the rest. One of her friends answered traditional English parenting is about having the nanny to do the parenting while the parents go to balls or work, if not upper-class and children should be seen as well as not heard. Her friend also said that there should never be any books written about parenting, which is what nannies are for just like Mary Poppins.
However, Drozdowski found the approach may be a conservative type of English parenting and also somewhat old one. So she searched the Internet to be updated. Here are the English chief approaches to parenting that she found out in blogs about British parenting like A Cup Of Jo: exercising "negative politeness" (mainly, not speaking to strangers when in public and working under the notion that they would rather be left alone); not posting on social media about new things happening to the babies; and not upsetting about childproofing.
All those things she learned she put in an experiment. So for one week, she tried to adopt those approaches. She also included more relaxed English approach to parenting altogether, including not distressing how much sweet the baby is taking in or about any swear words.
In the end, she realized that she is now ready to take on English parenting towards raising her daughter, particularly now that they are preparing to transfer to England in 2017. She realized after the experiment that it will not be hard for her to raise her daughter in England as she already has practiced main English styles to parenting. She also emphasized that this does not mean that she totally abandoned several American conducts of parenting.
