Screaming Children

What I don't hear in London.

For the past three months, I’ve been living in a flat in Chiswick, one of London’s many villages. It’s a sweet little place. Families, a busy high street, young and old out and about at the weekend markets and in the thriving pubs. The kind of place you’d want to live, though maybe not visit on a short holiday. There’s nothing sexy here, just ordinary people living their ordinary lives.

My sunny rented flat looks over the road, midway between the tube stop and the high street, so there’s plenty of foot traffic. I’m here for a writers’ workshop, and as I sit working in the front room, the sounds of life drift in through the open windows: couples bickering, kids laughing, music from passing cars. But after a decade in Switzerland, what stands out to me is what I don’t hear: the near absence of children crying–especially the very young.

Today, though, my work was interrupted by a very unhappy child wailing outside– the hiccupping, coughing cry of a child in meltdown, overwhelmed by emotions too big for its tiny body. Wee barks of ‘Papa, Papa’ between sobs caught my ear. In Switzerland, it is always ‘Mama, Mama’.

I needed to stretch my legs, and I was curious how this would unfold, so I stood up and looked out. There on the pavement, a young father stooped over a pram, patiently unbuckling his squirming child, who was not making it easy. He slipped the straps off the little arms and hoisted his son onto his hip. Holding him close with one arm, he grabbed the pram handle with the other and off they went. The blond boy, pink-faced and desperate, soothed himself by sticking his fingers in his mouth. The sobs still came, but within a few seconds, there was silence. Comfort asked for. Comfort given. The simple maths of parenthood.

In Switzerland, where I stay most of the year, I live just up the hill from a primary school and a public garden that hosts a pre-school programme. The kids are outside all the time, so I hear plenty of happy shouting at lunchtime and in the afternoons when they’re let loose. But what I hear even more of are the meltdowns at pick-up and drop-off.

Many, many times I’ve shut the windows to block out the terrible screaming–and often that isn’t enough, despite the density of Swiss window glass. On and on it goes. Very young children are left to scream, sometimes for upwards of thirty minutes, until they collapse in utter despair. Their humanity, their feelings, ignored by the very people they trust and depend on most: their parents.

It rips my guts out to hear it. Sometimes I put on music to drown out the sound of their pain. These are not simple temper tantrums; they are full-on collapses into a state of dysregulation. Very young children, their brains and bodies not yet fully developed, need soothing. They need us to guide them to calm with our adult brains and functioning nervous systems. Otherwise, you get a firestorm of exploding synapses. It’s awful to listen to. I can only imagine what it feels like inside their tiny bodies.

The Swiss parenting style is rooted in the core national value of personal responsibility. Everyone takes care of themselves, and, the thinking goes, society functions best. Swiss teachers and schools do not acknowledge bullying. It is not a thing. If your child is picked on by older or cruel children, it’s their job to stand up for themselves. Which, of course, has never stopped any bully in history– the whole point is that bullies choose targets who can’t stand up to them. It’s the group that stops the bully, not the victim. But here, the group looks away, society tells the victim they’re at fault, and the victim believes it. Just as a screaming two-year-old is left to deal with their own suffering until they realise their mother does not care and their pain is not her concern. Eventually, the child shuts down.

But trust me when I say that it can take a long, long time. The plea of ‘please help me calm down’, delivered through tears and screams, doesn’t stop just because the parent is unresponsive; it continues until the child is drained and spent, and yes, I’ll say it, damaged. I would even go as far as to draw a direct line to the ‘assisted’ suicide problem here in my canton of Basel-Stadt.¹ If you want to kill yourself, go ahead. That’s a choice you’re free to make. Who are we to stop you?

Personal responsibility writ large is a lesson every Swiss child must learn. I just don’t particularly enjoy being an unwilling audience to it, and I don’t look forward to going back to it in the autumn.

Getty Images

1. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/assisted-suicide/pegasos-association-rekindles-controversy-over-assisted-suicide-in-switzerland/90228578