Parenting in the United States is broken. Can Argentina help us fix it?

After a decade of parenting in Argentina, I can't help but wonder: Do the happiest parents in the world live in Argentina?

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My Argentine husband and I recently left our home in Buenos Aires to spend a few weeks in the United States with our kids. We do this several times a year and it is always predictably exhausting for all the reasons familiar to parents who travel with young children.

But this time I felt a second, more insidious layer of mental fatigue that was stronger than ever. I realized that a series of events on the trip had made me internalize the crazy parenting pressure created by the USA’s now widely accepted form of child-rearing, which I’ll describe as — helicopter parenting, but now with even more insane expectations.

In short, it took just a few weeks of parenting my Argentine kids in the United States to feel like I was losing my mind.

When we got back home to Argentina, I breathed a sigh of relief.

“I don’t know if I could ever be a parent in the USA,” I said to my husband.

For the millionth time, he agreed.

A decade into this parenting thing, my husband and I know the truth: the happiest parents in the world just might live in Argentina.

Do the happiest parents in the world live in Argentina?

In this piece, I’ll share a decade’s worth of hard-won wisdom about why parenting in Argentina is so much easier than it is in the United States (and in a lot of other places).

Before I get into all that, it is essential to point out that I am writing from the perspective of a privileged Argentine family. This wonderful country is going through a major economic crisis, and poverty hit a 20-year high of 57.4% this year. This is extremely upsetting. Issues facing the lower class are not addressed in this post. I should also note this article runs in contrast to the vast majority of the parenting-is-better in XYZ country books, like Bringing up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, and life-is-better in XYZ country books, like Under the Tuscan Sun, which rarely tackle the different issues facing the Global South.

Ultimately, despite the challenges of living in an emerging market, for the middle and upper classes of Argentina there are wild advantages when it comes to parenting.

First and foremost, due to the huge support system.

The support system in Argentina makes it much easier to be a parent. Full stop.

When I gave birth to my first daughter in Argentina a decade ago, my husband had prepared me for the fact that, during my four days in the hospital after my medicated birth (which is, incidentally, called “natural” here, because why the hell wouldn’t you want the epidural that medicine made for you), a lot of people would want to come visit. So many people that an entire day could easily be spent passing your baby around to folks who had left work to come bring you presents. (I had done this for others at this point, so I knew the drill.) And although I opted for an in-home baby-meet the next week, it stuck with me: there were so many people.

If it takes a village to raise your child, then you can find that overflowing village in Argentina.

If it takes a village to raise your children, then you can find that village in Argentina.

At its core, the culture of community around child rearing in Argentina is so integral to parenting here, and so anathema to the individualistic way of the United States, that it is honestly hard for people in the USA to understand how different it is to parent in Argentina.

Much of this support comes from friends and family.

Nearly 75% of Argentines are primarily of Spanish and Italian descent, and Latin culture is big on family and bigger on kids. There is still a long tradition of Sundays with family, January-long summer vacations with the extended clan, and calling your mother all the time. In general, there is a strong cultural trend of people staying where they are born if the economy allows. Roots are roots. People from the provinces stay in the provinces and people from the Buenos Aires area, where a third of the country’s 45 million people live, stay in Buenos Aires. Furthermore, 18-year-olds aren’t fanning out to different parts of the country for college like in the states, since kids live at home until they finish college, which doesn’t happen until around 25 due to a different university system. The result is that the family and friends you grew up with live closer to you. Full stop.

And those people want to hang out. A lot.

Just as my Argentine friends laugh at the memes of people in the United States scheduling cramped two-hour get-togethers with friends months in advance or telling guests to leave their house at nine, my North American friends laugh at how social my family’s life is here. Argentina is an extraverted country of 10-hour Saturday lunch hangs, impromptu dinners on a Tuesday that go until 1 am, and vacations with friends that are longer than many US folks get in a year.

us on an annual winter vacation with friends. as my doctor said when I asked what else I should be thinking about this year to stay healthy, “Be More Social!” (she referenced a study in the NYT about the role of socializaing in longevity.)

Recently, my husband knocked on my office to say that he and his friends were going away to the countryside for the weekend. It was a Thursday. He does this every month or two. (Yes, we have way more vacation here than in the United States.) Since we have a huge support system, this was not a big deal. I happened to be texting with my friends in the USA right then and I told them the latest. They laughed and laughed. Nightlife for parents is also a regular thing here, something that hasn’t been seen since the 1950s in the USA. (I recently left a Tuesday night dinner to meet the moms for one of my kids’ classes after midnight. I was the first to leave.)

Aside from the support parents get from friends and family, much of this is also thanks to a vibrant culture of paid support in the home. You can read about the economics of service jobs in the Global South here, but suffice it say that paid support in the home is common for people of different economic classes in Argentina. In Latin America, 6% of all workers are domestic workers. In the United States, that number is only 0.5%! (In the Arab states domestic workers represent a whopping 35% of all workers, and in Asia it is 14%.)

As I often explain, the lack of in-home help in the United States is less an economic issue than a cultural one related to individualism, self-sufficiency and the focus on privacy and the nuclear family. Few upper-class people in the United States have daily support in their home, but many middle middle-class people in the global south do. It is obvious how this creates a very different environment for raising children.

Schooling itself is also very different.

In school in Argentina, the focus for kids is on emotional and social learning. This makes happier parents.

This was another shocker for me as a mother. My eldest is finishing private primary school at a school that is often thought to be the best in the country, and I have been shocked that, throughout her time, she has had an almost complete lack of homework.

Instead, the emphasis has always been on social and emotional learning over grades.

There have endless absurd moments when it comes to me being a cold, Northern, metrics-based mother confronting a very different educational system. Cue me asking a teacher why they don’t have homework and being told that the goal is not to have that until secondary school! Or me worried one of my kids isn’t reading like his US counterparts and hearing he’s not behind at all! Or me investigating how one of my gifted kids can better advance and being told it’s most important for him not to miss any class birthday parties!

It all reminds me of my primary care doctor, who I saw yesterday for my annual check up. When I asked her what else I should be thinking about to stay healthy, aside from eating well and exercising, her first suggestion was: Be Social!

(She referenced this study written about in The New York Times, The Secret to a Long Life is Bocce.)

There is way more mental health support for kids

In Argentina, there is hugely popular branch of study called psicopedagogía, or educational psychology, and many professionals work in each private school, as opposed to just one or two guidance counselors in a typical school in the United States. As a mom of three, it often feels like I can’t walk ten feet without running into these professionals, and into kids who have private one.

You get a psicopedagoga, and you get a psicopedagoga and you get a psicopedagoga!

They are all around, and they are just one manifestation of the fact that mental health resources for kids are way more available. As a result of the fact that Argentina has more psychologists per capita than any other country in the world, there are a lot of professionals to help kids, which leads to happier parents. (According to the WHO, Argentina has 222 for every 1,000 people, whereas the USA has only 30.)

The issues such professionals deal with are different than in the USA. Aside from the obvious (?) fact that we have zero school shootings, kids in Argentina face way less academic pressure than they do in the United States.

There is much less academic competition.

When my friend

Kirsten Powers

told me she was writing a book based on her viral Substack post, The Way We Live in the United States Isn’t Normal, she couldn’t help but ask me some questions. One had to do with the over-scheduling of kids that is so common in United States. The reality is that the culture of extracurriculars is very much alive in extraverted Argentina (although certainly not as dire as in the USA), and I told her as much.

But then I took this to my Argentine mom friends to crystalize why it is different than the United States. We decided it’s the purpose of these activities that sets Argentina apart.

In Argentina, when a kid is taking part in rugby or musical theater or ceramics classes the goal is not to see if the kid will become the next prodigy, but instead for the child to have fun and socialize. I think about this a lot when I see my kids choosing what to do and not do outside of school. Eleven-year-old me hated piano with a vengeance but had already internalized the message that I should stick with it because an instrument, like all my other after-school extracurriculars, was “good for my college application.”

My eldest? She does what she wants, and it would never occur to her that any of her activities had anything at all to do with some mythical university in the far-off future.

The university system here is a huge factor in all this, since Argentina’s nationalized university system brings with it only a teeny, tiny fraction of the brutal gauntlet of college application pressure and stress that US teens face. Adolescents leaving secondary school in Argentina do take very hard placement tests they study a lot for, but for the most part they all wash up at one of the many Buenos Aires based universities in the area, still living at home, still hanging regularly with their secondary school friends.

Although 29% of primary and secondary age kids going to private school in Argentina due to the poor quality of the public system (versus only 9% in the USA), at the university level the emphasis is on public education. That’s because some of the best universities, like The University of Buenos Aires, my husband’s alma mater, are… you guessed it: free for students (aka publicly funded).

The costs of private ones are also wildly affordable in comparison to the US.

There are other reasons as well that make being a parent here so much easier. Healthcare is high on that list.

Free medical care

In general, medical care is far, far better.

Argentina has nationalized health care, although up to 63% of the population has an additional private healthcare system funded by their employee paychecks, mostly run by unions (15% of this number is partially self-funded). On top of that, there is another 12% of the population, which I belong to, who voluntarily hire private healthcare.

In other words? No one here goes bankrupt over healthcare costs.

This of course runs in stark contrast to the nightmare of medical care in the United States.

When my daughter was three and my twin boys were 18 months we took them to the United States for a three-week visit. During that time, one of the twins had to go to the ER. After some blood tests, an ER doctor diagnosed him with a UTI. The price for all this? $6,000. Another time, my young daughter needed two stitches on her lip. That cost? More than $11,000. (The travel health insurance I always buy reduced the costs of each by about 95%.) This is not a post about why the health insurance system in the United States is broken. There are thousands of those. But these are just a few examples.

The care itself is on a level that people in the United States simply are not aware of. Front and center in my mind as a parent are the at-home visits, which I have relied on in ten years of parenting. I do not have to explain how much of a win this is for parents of young kids. Winter is coming, which means my kids have begun the endless cycle of sickness familiar to all parents of young ones. Do you want me to tell you how many times a doctor has been to my house this month?

Additionally, the medical care I’ve received as a woman of child-bearing age has been far superior to anything I’d get in the United States.

My in vitro fertilization was affordable through my health insurance (it is now covered widely by the state). The level of care I have received through several pregnancies, including one that was insanely complicated, was impeccable. My twins, born 9.5 weeks premature, spent 56 days in the NICU. The bill to me, when presented at the end of their stay? Zero pesos.

my twins spent 56 days in the NICU after my emergency cesarean at 30 weeks. the cost to us? zero.

As my OB/GYN reminds me, most of her patients who have moved overseas keep her and do their annual check-ups when they return to visit family, since the care is so much better. In just one example, when I lost a pregnancy, my OB helped me avoid a painful D&C and instead got a specialist to perform a painless procedure largely unknown in the United States due to its cost to health insurance companies. 

Less Food Policing, Less Stuff, Less Choice

In terms of food, there is much way less policing than in the USA.

Before I had kids, I remember an expat from the United States saying she was shocked that on school tours with her kids in Buenos Aires they gave them candy. Candy! She did not like this. The fact that I didn’t find this shocking is probably why I’ve lasted as a parent so long in Argentina. I hadn’t seen anything yet. Reader, my pediatrician gives my kids candy at the end of every visit. (To be fair, she always asks me if it’s OK beforehand). Kids drink Coke. And coffee. At 6 PM! (Dinner during the school week is at 9.)

And, medically, it’s all… working?

Argentina has far less childhood obesity than the USA (rates are less than half). There are genetic reasons, of course, but if you believe that everything in moderation a good body makes, then there is reason to be okay with only sweets for breakfast, lots of red meat, and soda, soda, soda, ad nauseum.

In Argentina, we also have far less stuff.

My best friend’s husband once told me that since they have been married, a day hasn’t passed that a package hasn’t been delivered at their door. I don’t think he was kidding. I get it. I was born in the USA and lived there for the first couple decades of my life. When I tell people the two hardest things about living in Argentina I regularly say: not having Amazon Prime. I end up spending a couple months of the year in the United States, and one of my greatest joys is the loot I bring back. (My mother, who stores it all in my parents’ house, is less happy about this.)

my first trip to the USA during the pandemic, in November of 2020. here I am, in my happy place, with all my Amazon boxes.

In Argentina, houses are smaller, a healthy percentage of country’s population lives in apartments in the large capital city, and McMansions are very few and far between.

In general, there is also just way less choice.

Just as I get overwhelmed in a United States supermarket with the ten new types of vegan yogurt that have been invented since my visit two months ago, so do my kids when they visit California and every activity available to human children, anywhere, sits at their fingertips. Disneyland? Sea World? Lego World? Great America? An indoor water park? Which one? Or what about a fun and unusual museum! The Museum of Ice Cream? The Museum of Candy? The Museum of Slime?

As a parents, we think choice is best, but studies largely show it’s not.  

That’s because when you’re a parent you want the absolute best for your kid. But with the world as your oyster, how do you decide? And when you do, how do you overcome the regret or not knowing if you made the right decision? Especially if the other choices are just sitting there, in the 47 still-open tabs on your Google Chrome?

As Argentina Shows, Parenting Doesn’t Have to be So Hard

When I was in the USA, I also hung out with my best friends at one our annual girls’ weekends. As usual, the topic turned to kids and families, which we are full of.

A question came up, and we all did the rounds with our answer.

The question was: What is the one thing you are optimizing for in this stage of your life?

My answer: Ease.

Alongside my husband, our choice to raise kids in Argentina is a reflection of that decision. My kids, who are privileged, have a wonderful life in Argentina, and many of the factors that go into it being wonderful simply aren’t things that regularly available to kids in the United States. (Independent of resources.)

It’s also just because it’s way more fun.

My husband is famous for saying that “Americans know how to work, but they don’t know how to have fun!”

(In this quote, he’s referring to people from the United States. As my daughter and all Argentine children regularly point out, Argentines are obviously also “American”.)

I think he’s right.

And when I’m parenting in Argentina, with more support, and less pressure, and fewer insane expectations piled up on top of everyone involved, it allows me to have it.

Downsides: Argentines aren’t experts in being prepared, they are experts at crisis.

That’s not to say there aren’t many problems with living in Argentina, specifically, or in any emerging market.

Every kid I know here has driven dozens of times without a car seat. There is far less pool safety. Nobody has tested for Covid in years (we barely have tests, anyway). But the result of his more laidback attitude absolutely creates less daily anxiety for parents. The 100 plastic things you buy in the USA to prevent your kid from getting their finger getting stuck in a cabinet do usually prevent your kid from getting their finger stuck in a cabinet. But how much extra worry does the pressure that one should buy the 100 plastic things add to unneeded worry in parent? Especially if most of the time a kid gets a finger stuck in a cabinet it’s…not a big deal?  

Argentina is a very complicated country. Although 100 years ago Argentina had one of ten highest GDPs in the world, the last 100 years has seen the country hit crisis after crisis: several military dictatorships, repeated bank crises, a country topping the lists with the highest inflation in the world. If the last 100 years of Argentine history was a theater production, the plot would be regularly peppered by the protagonists, running in with their hair on fire.

HAIR ON FIRE! STAGE LEFT!

The result? A population extraordinarily skilled in resilience.  

A couple years ago, when we entered a new period of official hyperinflation, my friends congratulated me. Your first! But I was worried. If we had horrible inflation before (I hadn’t used US debit or credit card here in 15 years thanks to the currency crisis), then what did it mean for it to be… even worse?

“Don’t worry,” one friend said laughing. “We are experts at crisis.”

Argentines are experts at crisis. In life, and in parenting.

And Argentines are.

In fact, there’s even a crisis narrative when it comes to the country and its citizens.

(As I write this, I have just finished reading my favorite Sunday magazine insert from Argentina’s La Nacion. Inside, two articles jump out. One, an article entitled, Crisis, What Crisis? Our daily exercise is to feign dementia. It is about a family playing a board game at a gas station in Venezuela, with power and water cut. Any Argentine reading can empathize! And then, a profile on a famous Argentine designer, with the headline quote, “It’s part of my DNA to create and design in crisis.”)

This is true for life, and for parenting.

In the United States, the dominant parenting ethos seems to be a grim mix of the doomsday reminder to “Always be prepared” with the miserable self-sufficiency of “I alone must fix it!” The pressure and expectation this puts on parents to prevent and then solve every eventuality is bonkers, as evidenced by the fact that I can’t take it after just a few weeks. (Yes, there are parents opting out or opting for better (free-range parenting pushes hard against snowplow and helicopter parenting; co-housing communities aim to bring families together), but it is still universally the US norm.)

In contrast, Argentines’ more laissez faire approach to parenting – and life – takes the attitude that 95% of the things you worry about happening to your kids will never happen, so try to enjoy your life – and your kids – while you’re at it!

Overwhelming, the message about parenting in Argentina is clear.

Parenting doesn’t have to be so hard.

Bad stuff may happen. But when it does, the Argentine village will help.

I’d love to hear if this resonated with you, or to hear about interesting experiences parenting in other lands. Please leave a comment below.