WHEN Petra Machanova sits down in front of the TV after supper with the children on a Friday evening, she often reflects on her idyllic life in Britain, 700 miles from home. She loves London, is very well treated, and even likes the food. But there is one thing she will never get used to: the behaviour of British children.
“British children are some of the worst behaved I’ve met,” the 24-year-old Czech au pair says. “Not all of them — but maybe 80 per cent are pretty bad. They behave in a way that would not be allowed in my own country. Many times, I have met English families where it is not the parents who are in charge, but the kids.” Petra is one of tens of thousands of au pairs from the former eastern bloc now working in Britain. Sometimes it seems as if urban, double-earning, middle-class Britain has almost entirely placed the upbringing of its children into the hands of young women and men from Eastern Europe: nannies, au pairs and cleaners from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia have replaced the nice middle-class convent girls from Switzerland, Italy and France of 20 years ago.
But what does this new generation of au pairs make of us? Not a lot, to go by the picture painted by those working in metropolitan London. To put it bluntly, they think that we are getting it terribly wrong.
Petra has worked for several British families in the past three years. She is currently helping to look after three delightful children in a double-earner family — the father is a television scriptwriter and the mother works several days a week as a market researcher. These children are well behaved, but she says that generally British children never do as they are asked. “You see it in the playground after school. At going-home time, parents are always running after their children, asking them ten times to get their coats on and come. The children just ignore them. In my country, it would be very bad not to do what you are told.
“Children here are rude and they use bad language — and they are never punished. I know of au pairs here who have described this situation: they have asked the children to do something, but the children have just answered back and used foul language. And all the time the parents have been standing right there and haven’t said a thing.”
British children demand that adults fetch and carry, rather than doing anything for themselves, Petra says. “I just can’t imagine telling my mother ‘give me this’, or ‘do that for me’ — I’d have been smacked. I was expected to have respect.” British children do very few jobs around the house, she adds. She has become so conditioned to this that when she recently visited a nine-year old nephew near Prague she was amazed to see how much he helped his mother.
Hannah, 23, from Slovakia, agrees. Another popular au pair, Hannah gets on well with “her family” and enjoys looking after the children, three girls aged from 9 to 15. But generally, she says, British children are spoilt, selfish, lazy and rude, while most parents seem unable to do anything about it. It doesn’t matter if the children are rich or poor, from good homes or bad.
“It seems that kids here get everything they want, not what they deserve. They hardly do anything for themselves,” Hannah says. “If I ask the girls to tidy their rooms, they say: ‘But Hannah, you’re our au pair and you’re paid to do it — it’s not our job’. And the 15-year-old — she just sits at the computer all day long, she doesn’t do anything else. These are not bad children. It is the way they are allowed to be.”
During her stay in Britain, Hannah has seen children hit their parents, ignore requests, wilfully disobey, swear, make petulant demands and refuse their food — all with their parents failing to intervene. Part of her job is to serve food and drink to children quite old enough to look after themselves. “When my girls come home hungry from school and ask me to make them something to eat, I say: ‘Let me show you how to do it, so you can do it yourself’. Suddenly they ’re not hungry any more.”
Vera Cervenclova, 28, from Bohemia, also watches in dismay as British children turn their noses up at their suppers, while parents struggle to provide a satisfactory choice. “When I first came I was shocked at how much food is thrown away here, and how parents just accept what children say. When I was a child, if Mum made you a meal and you didn’t eat it you went to bed hungry,” she says.
“In Britain, children get presents all the time. By the time they are ten, they have everything — PlayStations, computers, TVs. It’s because their mums come back so late after work and feel so guilty, they buy them things to make up for it. Children in Britain just don’t know where the line is, but if they are disobedient, the parents just say: ‘Well, they’re only children’.
“Parents here don’t spend enough time with their children. Once you have a child, it should be the biggest part of your life, not just something you hand over to someone else.”
Romana Macakova, 26 — who has now returned to her home town in eastern Bohemia — thinks that British children are better off than Czech children because they have more choice, more money and better prospects. But she says that kids here are much less capable and independent. “Children don’t cook, they don’t do things around the house, they don’t walk to school. As a child I had to do things myself and I learnt a lot.”
Perhaps that is why young Eastern Europeans make such good au pairs — cultural and economic conditions mean that most (even boys) are used to looking after young children and running a home. In the Czech Republic, most mothers work, but rely heavily on family and grandparents to bring up children. Au pairs, of course, are unknown.
The nature of au-pairing has certainly changed. No longer a “mother’s help”, au pairs now often take on full responsibility for children in their parents’ absence — but as parents, are we taking too much of a back seat? Some authorities, including the Australian parenting writer Steve Biddulph, say that Britain and other developed countries have a “discipline deficit”.
Quickly leaping to our children’s defence, Debbie Cowley, of the Parenting Education and Support Forum, says that the majority of British children are not as bad as they have been painted. “In a lot of countries, the definition of ‘good behaviour’ means never questioning your parents or what you are asked to do, and generally not being inconvenient. This could be what traditional au pairs have been brought up to expect. However, these au pairs’ views may not be completely inaccurate. Over 40 years we have been moving from a strict hierarchical society, and we are still feeling our way towards a new one in which there is an element of discipline, but without the same rigidity — where children’s creative potential can be achieved. It’s urgent that we sort that out.”
The Thomas Coram Research Unit, at the Institute of Education in London, is shortly to launch a study into how children’s behaviour and parental discipline has changed over the years. According to Marjorie Smith, a psychologist and the head of the institute, “parents negotiate with children far more — and that can be a good thing. I don’t think most parents would feel they are not in control. But it’s true that some parents are just not good at getting the message across when children are out of line.”
Perhaps the influx of strict young au pairs from Eastern Europe could turn out to be the best thing to happen to today’s children. Or have the au pairs just argued themselves out of a job?
Some of the names have been changed
CONTACT DR JANE COLLINS
Dr Collins will answer questions on your children's health every Saturday. E-mail drjane@thetimes.co.uk or write to her at: Body&Soul, The Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. Please include your name, address and telephone number. Dr Collins is unable to enter into correspondence
