Babies, Teenagers, and Cultural Difference

One of the joys of travelling is discovering cultural differences. Until you run up against a different culture, you probably assume that what you do locally is the same as what everyone else does. In many cases it is not.

I will never forget my surprise the first time I had to catch a bus in Denmark.

There were a few people milling around at the bus stop, but no-one by the bus sign. I therefore stood by it and waited, secure in my first-in-queue position. Then the bus arrived and stopped a little way off. Suddenly all the milling people materialized and hopped on. I arrived last – and confused.

It turns out that queue culture is not universal. The Danes don’t do it, and their position near the top of the world’s happiness index suggests that they are not, in any way, aware of lacking this important Anglophile courtesy custom.

The same applies to language. It took me some years to accustom myself to Danish bluntness. A request that in English would be hedged with “Could you possibly…” or “Would you mind doing….” will just be said straight up. In Danish, “if you have a moment, I’d appreciate your having a look over this” is translated as “come here.” Brutal, but efficient.

This directness seems to be a feature of northern Europeans – who equally regard the English as obnoxiously flowery and insincere. I have worked with a number of delightful Dutch and German colleagues who have been regarded as rude by other colleagues, just because they called a spade a spade.

Directness seems to be a feature of northern Europeans – who equally regard the English as obnoxiously flowery and insincere.

This extreme honesty is particularly encapsulated by the Dutch. Multiple Dutch friends have complained that New Zealanders don’t say what they mean and then bear grudges if you try to be straight up with them.

In Holland, they say, you can have a heated discussion with someone about an issue at work and then have a pleasant time with them at the pub in the evening. The Dutch are expected to say what they think, and that is not held against them.

How I wished, at times, that I was teaching in Holland. Trying to help New Zealand design students was hugely complicated by the fact that many of them seemed incapable of distinguishing between honest feedback aimed at improving their future performance and vicious criticism intended to crush them emotionally.

As a teacher, you ended up having to give five pieces of uplifting positive feedback in order to slip in one mild suggestion for improvement. This hyper-sensitivity on students’ part was extremely unproductive and slowed their pace of learning.

In New Zealand, you had to give five pieces of uplifting feedback just to slip in one mild suggestion for improvement.

There is a saying in the creative world that “sometimes you have to kill your babies.” Its a variant on Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's “murder your darlings,” and it was obvious that my students had no intention of doing so.

In the classroom they clung to their tentative beginnings with all the grasping passion of a Gollum to his ring and resented anyone who suggested that their work was anything other than the world’s most beautiful creation. They clearly regarded their ideas as their babies and fought for them like thoroughly over-protective parents.

This was evidently not something that could be changed, but eventually I decided that it could be reframed.

I started telling students, when they brought their ideas along to present in class, that I wanted them to regard their work not as babies, but as late-adolescent teenagers who needed encouragement to vacate the familial residence as soon as possible.

The students’ job was thus to allow their ideas to stand on their own, to become independent, and to allow them to fail, or fly, as the case may be. Eighteen-year-olds understood all about teenagers wanting independence and how annoying protective parenting was, and this allowed them, in theory at least, to understand the issue staff were grappling with.

Not that it necessarily resolved the issue of protectiveness. That is a hard reflex to control, but at least my approach gave a starting point for conversation – “Do you remember how we talked about babies and teenagers. Yes? So, what type of parent do you want to model in class today?”

Of course, in Holland, I could just have told them not to be so precious and got on with having a constructive discussion about how to improve their work but, in the circumstances, I had to accept the cultural difference and be content with baby steps.