In a survey released this month by King's College London, it found that having well-behaved kids is not a huge concern for Americans. In 2017, 52 percent of parents in the U.S. said they do not find kids having good manners an important quality. This makes the U.S. the country least likely of the 24 countries surveyed in recent years to believe that manners are crucial for children. This is a significant drop from 1990 where 76 percent of U.S. adults said it was an important quality for children to be well-mannered. This is a major contrast between other countries such as Egypt, where 96 percent of those surveyed said good manners should be a top priority when parenting. In second place is Nigeria with 89 percent, followed by Morocco with 88 percent.
The information comes from a report by King's College London, titled "Parenting priorities: international attitudes towards raising children," which used data from one of the largest surveys in the world, the World Values Survey. The survey is based on the latest information that is gathered from each country during the latest installment of the World Value Survey, spanning from 2017 to 2022.
Another factor with well-mannered children is good behavior, and the survey found that even fewer U.S. adults said that obedience was a key quality for children. Only 21 percent of U.S adults said they valued obedience while Nigeria comes in first place with 58 percent. Mexico and Egypt follow close behind with 57 percent and 56 percent when it comes to the importance of obedience. The country that cares the least about obedience is Japan with just 3 percent of adults saying it was an important quality for children to have. In many western countries, the importance of good behavior and obedience has fallen drastically since 1990. “For example, in both the US and Australia, the share of the public who think this trait is especially important has roughly halved. In the former, it fell from 39% in 1990 to 21% in 2017, and in the latter it dropped from a peak of 39% to 19% between 2005 and 2018,” the report noted.
