Why do Americans hate children?

I live between the USA and Portugal ever since 2018. I bought my little “casa” in a tiny village as an act of rebellion against the 2016 election. I’d decided I needed what the British call a “bolt-hole.” Basically a safe haven against impending doom.

I started taking my children in the summer of 2019, to the countryside of Portugal, so that they could learn the language and set up roots somewhere else. I don’t KNOW that we’ll make the move here permanently, but that is the dream.

I’ve learned a lot since I’ve started spending my summers here. But one of the biggest is about my children.

Children are more of a rarity, here. Portugal has an aging population, and I find that families here are smaller. Couples might have one child or no children. It’s quite rare for me to find anyone with more than 2 kids. So being a family with 3 loud American kids, we stand out.

My children are blonde. The elderly Portuguese in my village love to touch my childrens’ heads. They tousle their hair at every opportunity. While I’m usuallly apologizing for my children’s loudness and misbehavior in the States, here I get a knowing nod of “Oh, aren’t they cute?” It’s….refreshing.

I’ve made friends with other ex-pats. One of my girlfriends here is a British ex-pat and she has an 8 yr old daughter who is going to the local school. When school was starting again, after the summer, she jokingly commented to the other parents that she couldn’t wait for school to start so that she could have time away from her daughter. Her joke was met with awkward silence.

Why? Because it’s a joke that they would never make. Children in Portugal are revered. Portugal has a dying population. That’s why they started their now TOO successful Golden Visa program that invited wealthy foreigners to invest in their country in exchange for citizenship.

But the Portuguese have a large aging population and a problem with emigration. There aren’t enough local jobs and the salaries are very low. Children are a gift, in this country.

I found myself in the Azores islands recently. My children were doing their whole “running around and being terrible” thing in the airport. I’m a single mother so I just tried to tune them out. There’s only so much scolding you can do, plus they were just being bored kids. We tried to get food at a cafe and there was no one there so my 6 yr old son walked around and knocked on the door. A single American woman said to him: “Why are you doing that??!” He was seeing if the worker was there because he was hungry! I let it go. Unfortunately, this lady was on our flight. She spent the whole day giving my child the stink eye. The flight was almost empty so my child sat in a seat in front of her and raised up the armrest. She said: “Stop doing that!” By the time we got to customs, we were all still together. We passed her in the line and she rolled her eyes at my son and said: “Ugg.” I mean, he wasn’t DOING anything, other than walking. But his mere existence annoyed her. I stopped and said: “Listen, I know you hate my kid but he’s literally just walking. You’ve done this all day. We get it, ok? You don’t like my kid. Let’s all move on!” The surrounding passengers laughed at how absurd it was and we walked on. I hate to use the word: “Karen,” but it was pretty Karen-ey.

But what struck me was that I NEVER have to deal with that in Portugal. It was the American who threw a fit. The Portuguese will correct your child, in a way that we Americans won’t, but it’s always out of love.

It’s made me think: maybe this is part of our bigger problem as a nation: we don’t revere our kids. We DON’T provide mothers with any reasonable maternity leave, (unless they work for a very generous company,) we DON’T provide decent child care, we DON’T have Universal medical care, and we DON’T stop school shootings, (even when there are cops standing outside of the school.)

I was in Figueira da Foz, Portugal this summer when a waitress asked me WHY Americans love guns so much. It caught me off-guard. “Um…we don’t…..um….it’s hard to explain……um……it’s just a different culture….um…….freedom?” I didn’t have an answer. But to these people it’s mind-blowing that we accept school shootings as normalcy. I have to agree. We are doing nothing of consequence to stop them. Yet we have the biggest military budget in the world. Why can’t we just move the national guard to the schools? At least then we GET something with our tax dollars? I know that we love bombing far-away countries but what about ours? We have the capacity to care for and protect our kids. We just choose NOT to. Why? Maybe our society just doesn’t love our kids enough, and we’ve accept this as normal. It’s really sad.

We are really “pro-life” unless it comes to caring for and protecting these kids.

It’s NOT normal. It’s time for the attitude that our children are a burden, to stop. We need to step up and value our children as the gift that they are….before it’s too late. We have the resources to care for and protect our kids. We just choose NOT to. We have accepted that our children can’t play in the streets without fear of being kidnapped. We have accepted that, if our kids get cancer, we may have a million dollar doctor’s bill. We have accepted that weirdos can walk into our schools and blow our childrens’ heads off as: “just another Tuesday.” It’s not normal. There is a world out there where children can WALK, without fear. They don’t HAVE to do active shooter drills. So maybe the problem is that we just don’t like these kids enough. It might also explain the whole “wine=mommy juice” attitude that our overstressed/undersupported moms have. Alcoholism is our substitute for a working society.

It does take a village; instead we’ve settled for an AR-15 and a shitload of screen time for our non-active children. We can do better. We just don’t want to.

In the meantime, my son is learning to play the accordion, because one of my Portuguese neighbors gave him an accordion for being so cute. Wish me luck…….Ugg!