What Moving Abroad Taught Us About Raising Kids (That American Parenting Never Did)

We left the US knowing our world was going to be turned upside down. We expected massive change. We knew there would be no familiar support systems, no comfort zones to retreat to. We knew there would be culture shock, language barriers, and a general adjustment period that would be challenging in ways we could not fully predict until we were actually in it. We knew the food would be different, that we would be walking significantly more than we ever had, and that the world is currently in a pretty complicated relationship with Americans as a whole.

What I did not expect was how completely and thoroughly living abroad would dismantle the way I think about parenting. I knew our perspectives would shift in some ways, because that is just the nature of immersing yourself in something new. But I did not expect my entire framework to be picked up, thrown across the room, and rolled around on the floor for a while before being handed back to me in a completely different shape.

I had read some books about French and Danish parenting. Not one of them prepared me for what it is actually like to parent in another country. You can read about it forever and still not be ready for the moment it actually happens in front of you.

European Parenting Is a Different Universe

The countries with the most relaxed, child-autonomous approaches to parenting tend to sit along the Mediterranean and up through Scandinavia. I have not spent time in Scandinavia yet, so I cannot speak to that personally. But having spent time in Spain and Greece, I can tell you my tiny American brain has been completely shattered by what I have seen.

Kids eat sugar whenever they feel like it. They stay out absurdly late. They speak their minds from a very young age and are actively encouraged to stand up for themselves. They engage with adults in ways that feel completely natural rather than coached. The level of independence and autonomy that children here are given would genuinely astonish and possibly terrify a large portion of American parents, myself included when we first arrived.

This is not a criticism of American parents. It is more of an observation about the systems and cultural norms we are raised inside of. More recent generations of American children have been, in my view, significantly coddled compared to what I see here. The independence I observe in European kids on a daily basis is something that would feel almost radical back home.

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The Edinburgh Moment I Think About Every Week

One of the most genuinely eye-opening experiences of this whole journey happened in a park in Edinburgh. I was sitting there surrounded by what felt like ten different languages being spoken at once, which in Edinburgh is entirely plausible, and it took me a moment to realize something: I was the only parent hovering. I was definitively the only helicopter parent in that park. I was almost certainly the only American.

Nobody was watching me or judging me, as far as I could tell. But I took a moment to actually look around and observe what the other parents were doing.

There was one family I will never forget. They were smoking cigarettes and more or less letting their children's life lessons be forged entirely in the crucible of the playground. At one point, one of their kids fell, cried, and looked back at the parent for support. The mom took the longest, most deliberate pull of her cigarette, looked directly at her child, and her expression communicated something along the lines of "you're fine." Completely calm. Not cold, not dismissive. Just utterly unbothered.

And the kid was fine. They got up and went straight back to playing.

I still think about that at least once a week. We were only in Edinburgh for four days, but that city changed something in me, partly because of that moment and partly because of the sheer volume of international life happening in every corner of it. Also, they apparently have a giant spacecraft in the middle of the city that they put away when the tourists go home. I have questions about that, but that's a different post.

Giving Kids a Voice at the Table

One of the most unexpected shifts in our day to day life as an expat family has been watching how adults here interact with children in public, and what that does for kids over time.

At restaurants, it is completely standard for servers to take the order directly from the child. The server looks at your kid, waits for them to speak, and gives them the space to actually answer. It sounds like a small thing, and in one sense it is. But in another sense, it is one of those small things that quietly adds up to something significant.

Back home, at least where we came from, you just order for your kids. Nobody expects otherwise, and nobody thinks twice about it. So when we arrived in the UK and a server looked past us and asked our daughter what she would like to eat, all four of us, both parents and both kids, were genuinely caught off guard. We had to completely rewire that expectation. Our girls had to be ready with an answer, because someone was actually going to ask them for one.

It took a while. And then one day they were ready. And now they love it. They walk into a restaurant with a level of quiet confidence they did not have before. Something about being asked, being expected to know, being trusted to decide, built something in them. I cannot explain it better than that, but I have watched it happen and it is real. Their voices are bigger than they were before we left.

The Playground Difference

Something else we noticed living abroad, and this one is harder to talk about but important: the level of accountability on playgrounds here, particularly in the UK, was noticeably different from what we had experienced at home.

Before we moved, our daughters had developed a real reluctance around playing with certain groups of kids, because their physical boundaries had not been respected and they had been hurt. As parents, that is one of the most uncomfortable situations to navigate. You want to intervene, you do not always want to make a scene, and you end up having conversations with your kids that no parent really wants to be having on a Tuesday afternoon at the playground.

In the UK, that problem basically went away. We felt, pretty consistently, that kids were held to a higher standard of physical respect for one another, and that parents around us shared that standard. Our girls could just play. They were not on guard. They were not coming to us upset. That mattered enormously, and it is something I do not take for granted.

The Thing You Stop Noticing When It Goes Away

This last one is something I want to be careful about how I say it, because I never want to lead with fear or make it the center of every conversation. But it is also something I think every American parent who has moved abroad will recognize immediately.

When you have lived in American cities long enough, you know what a gunshot sounds like. You have seen people drop when they were concerned about gunfire. You have watched crowds move quickly and urgently when something unclear happened in a public space and nobody wanted to find out what it was. That low-level, ever-present background anxiety is something you learn to live with because you do not have a choice. It lives in the back of your mind at a crowded train station, at a park, at a carnival. You cannot turn it off.

Since moving abroad, that noise has gone quiet. Completely quiet.

Being at the Córdoba Carnival with our girls, surrounded by hundreds of people, street food, music, fireworks, and genuine joy, and just being fully present without that nagging weight in the back of my brain, that is something I could not have fully explained the value of until I experienced its absence. You notice when it is gone. You notice how much energy it was quietly taking from you every single day.

I will trade every creature comfort I left behind in the US every single day of the week for my daughters to grow up without that being part of their world.

What Europe Did to My Parenting

Moving abroad did not make me a perfect parent. It made me a more honest one. It forced me to examine which of my instincts were actually protective and which ones were just fear that had been dressed up to look like good parenting.

The independence I see in kids here, the voices they are given, the space they are trusted with, none of that has broken them. It has built them. And watching my own daughters grow into that, slowly and in their own time, has been one of the unexpected gifts of this whole adventure.

We did not leave the US because we hated it. We left because we loved our kids enough to ask whether there was something better available. And the answer, so far, has been yes.

The Blog is only half the story. Moving a family across the world is 10% planning and 90% "figuring it out as we go." If you want to see the daily chaos, the travel hacks we use in real-time, and what life actually looks like when the cameras aren't perfectly positioned, come hang out with us: