So, Where Do We Begin?

Most of what we call normal is just familiar.

The way we feed our children, school them, and fill their afternoons — almost none of it is settled fact. It's inherited habit, passed down and reinforced until it stops looking like a choice at all.

I only noticed because I'd inherited a different set.

Seeing the Defaults

I grew up in Switzerland, in a childhood that would look almost quaint here. Everyone went to the local school. Activities happened once or twice a week, and we did them to be healthy and have fun rather than to become Olympic athletes. We played outside in every season, ate home-cooked meals, and came in when my mother called us for dinner.

When my husband and I started a family years later, in a large European city with a fiercely competitive school system, I discovered how much of what I thought was normal had simply been my Swiss upbringing.

It gave me a few I wouldn’t otherwise have had: the learned defaults, followed without question simply because that's the norm. I noticed them because I hadn't inherited them. And my own — the ones I'd carried from home — started to look just as arbitrary once I had the distance to examine them.

What Changed My Mind

I learned this the hard way, twice.

The first time, it took two years and an exhausting fight to get a daughter assessed for something her school had already decided was a character flaw. The second time, a specialist shrugged at me and said that if I didn't want the medication, she couldn't help.

Both times, nothing improved until I stopped taking no for an answer.

By the time I went to my own doctor, I'd started to wonder whether the problem was me. I'd been the mother asking too many questions for long enough that it was becoming easier to assume everyone else was right and I was simply being difficult.

I ran some fairly unconventional ideas past him, braced for the look I'd been getting elsewhere. He didn't dismiss any of it. He told me to keep going, and then said something I've thought about ever since: you only know what you know.

Doctors know what they were taught and what they've learned since, and the answer you get depends quite a lot on who you happen to ask.

It was the first time anyone with a medical qualification had suggested that continuing to ask might be reasonable rather than tiresome. I have been asking questions ever since.

What You’ll Find Here

Everyday epiphanies and questions from raising a family — food, school, and the defaults everyone seems to have agreed on without any discussion.

Plenty of it survives the questioning. Quite often I dig into something, find the default is there for a perfectly good reason, and carry on doing exactly what everyone else does, only with more conviction. The rest is what I write about.

To be clear, I'm not a doctor, and nothing here is medical advice — I write about what my own family noticed, tried, and learned, not necessarily what yours should do.

And I'm not marking America against Europe. I love this country, and living here is half the reason I notice anything at all. If living between two sets of norms has taught me anything, it's that normal is just whatever's familiar, wherever you happen to be standing.

I have nothing against the norm. I do however have plenty against the idea that one size fits all — particularly where children are concerned, given we know them rather better than any teacher, doctor, or specialist.