Permissive Dutch Have Less "Bad Behavior' In Children

HopeTracker| America is very big on banning behaviors, and especially in children under 21. We ban sex, drugs, drinking and — in some households — rock and roll in all its seductive, modern-day, musical variations.

Has America’s morality police actually succeeded in making America’s youth a globally-respected bastion of purity and good behavior?

Nope. More permissive cultures seem to understand facts of life that Americans do not. Making things illicit and decadent tends to give the behavior greater curb appeal, especially among the young.

TIME magazine’s Wellness blog tracks Salon’s The smart Dutch take on teen sex in their own article What the US Can Learn from the Dutch About Teen Sex.

With a more permissive attitude about all things ‘immoral’, Dutch youth are statistically way behind American youth in the ‘bad behavior’ department.

For example, the teen pregnancy rate in the Netherlands is just 12 pregnancies per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19. In the staid U.S., there are 72 pregnancies per 1,000 girls the same age. The Dutch teen abortion rate is 20% lower than that in the U.S. And the rate of HIV infection in America is three times higher than in The Netherlands. via TIME

A recent study on parenting compared Canada, France and Italy, concluding that Italy had the strictest parenting styles of the three countries. Even here, we must be careful of our research takeaways. Italian parents allow kids to drink wine with dinner. By integrating wine-drinking into family life, the Italians have a significantly lower level of alcoholism than the US.

More Reading: Canadian parents more lenient (than French or Italian ones)