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1 day ago
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For me, becoming a mother was an experience as disorienting and confusing as moving to a new country. I had to learn new behaviours and customs as well as which brands of nappy and baby food to buy. And little did I know that moving to the Netherlands after the birth of my first child would entail having to learn a whole new tongue besides Dutch.
I’m not talking about motherese, the high-pitched singsong ways parents speak to their children, but about the highly specific language mothers and fathers around the world now use to talk about being parents. And even though I spoke Polish, German and English by the time I had my eldest daughter (and have since learned Dutch and a bit of Russian), I struggled with this particular one.
Unsure of myself, I started reading parenting books and spent a lot of time on online forums, where I tried to find answers to my questions – or, when there weren’t any, then at least some support or understanding.
It was on BabyCenter that I first discovered this new parenting language. I often found myself resorting to Google to understand what people were saying. I had to familiarise myself with acronyms such as DS and DD (dear son and dear daughter), CS (caesarean section), EB (extended breastfeeding) and CIO (cry it out). This was also how new words such as pacifier, stroller and other baby-related terms entered my vocabulary. And all that after I had already taught myself the long and complicated terms related to pregnancy and birth: gestation, episiotomy and perinatal mortality, among others.
It didn’t take me long to notice that even the things I read in Polish were translations of books by English-speaking authors such as Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, which I suffered through just to try to understand why my daughter would not stop crying. Spoiler alert: it did not help. Parenting has changed a lot since US paediatrician Dr Spock told mothers of the baby boomer generation to trust themselves.
My copy of American parenting expert Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting was in English – despite being translated into 50 languages, including Polish – and after a while so was everything else I was reading. The only notable exceptions were two books by the Swiss paediatrician Remo Largo – whose ideas on caring for babies, and later children and teens, were incredibly popular in Germany (where my eldest daughter was born) – as well as some Polish blogs and parenting magazines.
But it wasn’t just me. My Polish-, Dutch- and German-speaking friends in the Netherlands were just as familiar with the same English-language parenting vocabulary I was now fluent in. This is no surprise, given that international groups online are most often English-speaking. But something else was going on. A Polish friend of mine spoke her mother tongue to her son except when she was trying to guide his behaviour. “Gentle,” she would tell him in English. “Gentle.” She wasn’t just speaking English. She was channelling new concepts and ideas she had read about on US and UK online forums such as gentle discipline or RIE.
Suddenly, people from all sort of places were talking the same things I had been reading about on English-language forums and blog posts, and in articles and books. Growing up in Poland, I kept hearing about wychowanie bezstresowe, or stress-free discipline. Now it was all about rodzicielstwo – the Polish equivalent of the English word “parenting”, with all its connotations such as rodzicielstwo bliskości (which literally means “parenting of closeness”, but is just the Polish name for US-style attachment parenting). It seems that in Poland, Dr Spock has also been replaced by “Dr Bill”.
It wasn’t all English, of course. Many of you are surely familiar with the work of early 20th-century Polish-Jewish paediatrician Henryk Goldszmit (pen name Janusz Korczak), who became known for his revolutionary views on children’s rights. The orphanage for Jewish children he ran in Warsaw had its own court, parliament and newspaper, for example.
Some of Korczak’s ideas sound like the gentle parenting philosophy so popular today: “Children want to be good. If they don’t know how to do something, teach them. If they don’t understand something, explain it to them. If they can’t do something, help them.” And that was decades before the US parenting guru Becky Kennedy would teach parents that children are good inside.
Some European experts even became famous in the US and the UK. The book The Wonder Weeks, a translation of the Dutch parenting manual Oei, Ik Groei! by the scientists Hetty van de Rijt and Frans Plooij, proved extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 90s.
One of my friends read it in English and told me she could look at the calendar and pinpoint with great accuracy the day her son would become fussy again, which according to the authors meant he was going through a developmental leap.
And, of course, books and articles about the way parents in Europe and other places raise their children are extremely popular in the US and the UK. However, from my experience, US and UK parenting ideas have a bigger sway in Europe than the other way around. What does it mean if the English language has such power to influence the way mothers and fathers raise their children around the world?
Something became clear to me when an American writer dropped by one day to interview me about my life in the Netherlands. My son complained about something, and I responded in my native Polish.
“Did he just ask for the milk?” the writer asked in English.
I nodded.
“And did you tell your son to ask for it nicely?”
With another nod, I smiled. Language can be divisive and a means of control, but it can also bring people together.
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Olga Mecking is a writer and journalist, originally from Poland, who lives in the Netherlands. She is the author of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing
