Why European Children Are Quieter

1) Nothing is homogeneous. Even a single static object is not 100% the same now compared to how it was 10 days ago. But in order to make any observation, one has to generalize to the point that has statistical significance.

2) Despite saying Europeans and Americans such articles don't mean ALL Europeans and ALL Americans. For Europeans they mostly mean Western Europe: Germany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, etc. For Americans they mostly mean the stereotypical middle class suburban American, not a Manhattanite yuppie, nor some Idaho farmer, or "white trash".

3) The idea is not to see if the article's observations hold 100%, but whether they hold more often than not.

In fact, I should take it all back, for I find in the process of communicating like a normal human I've generalized the very notion of improper nouns. Not all improper nouns are the same. And I've generalized generalizations themselves; not all of them are bad. Mea culpa.

In contrast, my experiences while I was in central England as far as politeness and service have been very positive, and are a credit to your nation.

However, that all utterly pales in comparison to Japan: I didn't know what service really is until I visited there. Nowhere else did I feel like I was on top of the world as a customer; I will never look at quality of service with the same eyes again.

Typical morning conversation American to American:

- Hey man how are you?

- good, and you?

- good too! See you later!

Now, that happens so fast that I have tried the following, and the answer was the same!

- hey man how are you?

- oh man my dog just died

- good too! See you later!

Basically, asking how you are is just a courtesy but frankly we don't have time for you.

- hey man how are you?

- well, you know, my wife has told me she wants to divorce me and my kids are not talking to me. It's been kind of rough you know?

- hey man sorry to hear. [starts walking away] I'd love to talk but I got a golf session to go to with my buddies. Keep it up ok? [dissapears]

sigh

It's like someone shouting in a library, whether it's my American colleague asking sometime else in the office a question, a couple of tourists on the metro, or an American family in a restaurant.

It's probably a large part of why Americans are often considered rude.

I'm not from Western Europe either, but it doesn't matter if they don't include us while talking about "Europe".

Most of such articles discuss the cultural core of Western Europe, even if they call it just "Europe". Europe might have 30+ countries, but it's mostly those Western/Northern few that define "Europe" for such purposes.

This stems from a lot of things, but the historical divide of the "Eastern Block" and the "North/South" also helped solidify it. Those Western/Northern European countries were large global empires and they still have the EU power, are big global economies, are members of the G8/G20, etc.

So other countries get the short end of the stick, even if nominally they are "Europe" too.

Portugal or Greece or Czech Republic, etc., might not even exist in most such treatments of "Europe" -- those, when are mentioned, are explicitly called "the south", "balkans", "eastern europe", etc.

I've observed this in Hungary, Germany, Spain and others.

My theory is that most Europeans, living all their life on a crowded continent, tend to move in closer to talk, and hence talk at a lower volume. Americans, used to grand amounts of space, sit back and project their voice.

Before coming here I visited and lived in many European countries and Italians for sure are the loudest in public settings (restaurants for example) - especially when there are many of them together. From my experience from Greek Islands Englishmen are the loudest of all - at home in England they are quiet and polite though . Germans are the quietest ones when traveling to other countries but loud at home sometimes.

All this is totally my subjective point of view of course.

First vs. third world problems, I guess.

It's "wilful privacy", if you will: as long as everybody respects the privacy, everything stays private, even though it takes only one person to break the illusion.

Privacy is a spectrum, not a binary.

Consider two women sitting on a park bench and people around minding their own business, and same two women sitting on a park bench with a few nearby men staring at them, making obvious gestures, etc.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea whether this is true as I have zero data. I don't even know whether European children are more quiet, let alone all the other assumptions and assertions going on here. We live near to a school (in UK, just outside London), and the kids definitely don't use their "1 metre voices" during the lunchtime break.

Children of the age we speak of are either at home, where there 0-2 other sibling children commonly, or at school, where there are many children (as many as would be in a US school). Nowhere the relative number of children in society comes into play here.

It's not like 7 year olds play out in the streets of Paris and are told to be quiet, or they suddenly learn to be quiet when they visit e.g. restaurants.

Plus Asian children are equally or more quite, even when there are tons of them.

It's mostly about spoiling them and/or indulging them to whatever whim, rather than sssh them.

Edit: Hmm, that came off snarkier than I intended. I didn't intend to imply that either approach is necessarily superior, just that surely there's a happy medium somewhere between the two extremes.