The following is an article I pulled from today's Times while trawling throught the "Parents" section. I'm sure it will echo many of our own fears, and hopefully joys.
Where has the sun gone?
By Sue Ellicott
When she moved her children from California to the British winter, our correspondent discovered that it wasn't just the weather they found strange
IT IS SEVERAL WEEKS into our new British life, but we are not yet over the shock of opening the curtains at 7.30am to find that it makes no difference. So long, California.
“Where is the sun?” asks Joseph, who is four. “Is it night-time?”
Everyone warned me that moving to London in midwinter would be hard on my children. My Los Angeles friends brandished the word “cruel”, judging their quality of life by the outside air temperature (24C when we left in January) and the number of hours of sunlight.
No, I had insisted, I wanted more for my two boys than year-round blue skies, sandy beaches and dog-poop-free parks. I wanted a real city, not LA sprawl. I wanted to walk to school, not race on a freeway four times a day.
I wanted buses, museums and cafés. I wanted my children to see their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins at weekends, not twice a year. I wanted them to go to school in a multicultural, multilingual environment. Above all, I wanted my children, who have dual UK-US citizenship, to have a set of roots in Europe while they are still young enough to grow them.
“Great,” said my friends. “You go, girl.”
“Terrific,” said my boys’ teachers. “What an adventure.” What I did not say was that I also wanted to live in the land of those two-quid airfares to Barcelona and Milan that my brother and his wife are always boasting about; and that I hoped my two boys might eventually adopt British accents and start calling me “Mummy” instead of “Mom”.
And so we said goodbye to our airy Spanish-style house and lemon trees and moved into a four-storey Victorian terrace in West London, six minutes on foot from the local primary school. We arrived at Heathrow one freezing Sunday, and the boys started school the next day, jet-lagged out of their minds.
My friends were half-right. It is a hard move. My boys miss their friends, thick pancakes for breakfast and even the freeways I loathed — I caught them playing an imaginary bedtime game of counting Jeep Cherokees and other 4WDs.
But it is not the weather that bothers my boys; it is the lack of grass, the adjustment to a more demanding curriculum and a rougher playground atmosphere.
The biggest change for six-year-old Nathaniel is that “it hurts when I fall over at school”. And it does. He is playing on tarmac now, not the wildly expensive AstroTurf that his private school installed when the real grass that it planted kept dying in the year-round heat.
There is perhaps nowhere in the United States more attuned to feelings than Santa Monica, where my boys were at school. Being considerate is everything.
One of them was devastated on his first day in London when a girl in his class told him that his handwriting was “stupid”. To his mind, she might as well have uttered a four-letter word.
I am changing too. When Nathaniel told me that boys were “pushing him over” at break, I lost sleep until I witnessed one of the traumatic incidents. It wasn’t bullying, as I had begun to fear, but a group of seven-year-olds letting off steam after being cooped up in a class of 30, using their bodies in ways that his American school would never have allowed. My British friends laugh at this. They joke that I have been raising my children as wimps. This will toughen them up, they say. Just you see. I dare not tell them that, to us, their children often appear insensitive. American children find the English playground to be full of bullies; not Tom Brown’s Schooldays exactly, but a harsher place than their own.
Then there are the odd customs that even I, who grew up in England, cannot fathom.
“Mom,” says Nathaniel at the end of his first week in Year 2. “Why do we have to take off our clothes and dance in our underwear?” What? “For PE, too,” says his brother, who is in Reception. “We have to take off our pants.”
I rescue myself from a blind panic. By “pants” he means “trousers”. They are confused — and cold. Furthermore, America has sensitised them to the problem of child abuse, and any teacher beyond nursery level in the US would risk a citizen’s arrest if she let students walk around in their underwear.
Last year, as I walked into Nathaniel’s US primary school class, a five-year-old boy was accusing one of his classmates of “looking at” him while he urinated. The accused, also five, and visibly hurt by the complaint, received a lecture from his teacher, even though the lavatories were communal and had no doors.
“Maybe it takes too long to change them all in and out of sports kit,” offers one mother, who has three children at our new school, when I ask about the vests.
So English, my friends in California chuckle — but what are vests?
Then I find a solution: on PE days, the boys now wear shorts under their long trousers. That seals it, I realise: we are odd. My friends think that we are “very American”, by which they seem to mean that we ask too many questions about things they put up with.
We also smile too much. Every day, when the school receptionist opens the main doors at 9am, my boys and I call out “Good Morning” to her amid the crush of parents and children. Every day she looks up, stunned. And then the boys figure out why.
“Nobody else says hello,” says Joseph. The receptionists at our last two schools in Santa Monica, one of Los Angeles’s affluent seaside suburbs, were jolly and welcoming, though perhaps that had something to do with the fees we were paying.
It dawns on me that I also expect the headmistress to care personally about me, or at least to act as if she does. Mistake. When I introduce myself as a new parent and hope to chat, she is too busy to stop.
Later, when I am stuck on the sweet stall at the school Valentine’s Day disco, selling cola and crisps for two hours straight, she does not thank me. Hey, I think, I am on first-name terms with all my principals in Los Angeles.
I don’t think that she is ungrateful, of course. It is simply a different style. American headmistresses tend to nurture their parents, if only because they need them for hefty financial donations to pay for the arts and sports programmes axed by the Government.
Here, however — and this is something of a relief — teachers seem pleased if you bother to make a tray of jam tarts for the class cake sale. In Los Angeles, even our local state school “suggested” that each family donate a minimum of $660 (£400) a year, in addition to volunteering in classes and at fundraising events.
After only half a term at their new school, my boys are settling. They are making friends. Things start looking up when two brothers invite them back to their house for tea.
“Hey, Mom,” they grin. “A playdate.”
Finally, they are on familiar ground. Here, as there, going to somebody else’s house is a childhood rite of passage. They have been accepted. We have arrived.
Our new school is lively and international. At pick-up, the hallways are full of chatter in Italian, Turkish, French, Farsi, Armenian. Nathaniel’s class is studying Africa, a continent most American children would struggle to find on a map, while Joseph sings a song that he’s learnt in Swahili as he skips to school.
Half-term rolls around. I get some tickets to Lisbon (not the cheap ones I have dreamt about, but good enough). This is it, we say. We are on our way.
