This is not a communist daycare center.
If I were to see some neighborhood kids doing something destructive or dangerous, would Brits think it weird or rude if I marched them back to their parents’ house and explained why I’d brought them home?
This is a cultural question that comes up a lot in our house. We live right next to a small park and on any given day there are a dozen shrieking children playing seven feet from my back door. The noise doesn’t bother me, but once in a while they do get completely out of hand. I’ve seen other neighbors tell them off for things like kicking a ball against their house or shoving each other into people’s front door, but what about when it’s dangerous? For example, the time last year that a group of pre-teen girls thought it’d be funny to literally lie in the road and play chicken with traffic. About a week ago, I caught some young men lighting the trees on fire. (And one had the audacity to tell me he’d be on his way as soon as he found the lighter he’d dropped!)
I grew up in the kind of neighborhood where everyone was on a first name basis and you respected the other moms as much as your own. But I’m not always sure it works that way here. People are really protective of their children here (in general.. obviously not if they’re not watching them, though) but I find that British kids are more autonomous than American ones. (It’s a strange dichotomy to me.) Where American children usually take a school bus from home to school and back again, British kids tend to walk further and take public transportation… if you get on a public bus at 3pm, it’s all kids. My husband says he regularly sees kids as young as seven riding on the trains alone in the morning. The town square is always full of children in the afternoon. The bus doesn’t take them straight home, so they don’t end up there! They play in town, not at each other’s houses.
(British kids are also completely impervious to rain, which is neither here nor there but amusing to me anyway. They just find a tree to sit under or keep playing; nobody goes home or in on account of rain.)
So, back to tattling* on bad children: how does that go over on this side of the pond? I’m tempted to do it anyway, before some teenager lights my house on fire, but it does feel to me like one of those cultural things that has just enough subtle difference that I should ask first.
* I find that British people don’t usually know the word “tattle.” To tattle is to tell on someone. It has a childish connotation… it’s what children are doing when they say something like, “he won’t give me a turn! he took my toy!”
