Definitely one thing Americans don't seem to know is that other kids are not NEARLY as loud and whiny. Also Americans find it cute when kids have weird lisps and other poor speech habits, which other people do not.

Why are American kids so loud and whiny?

I'm pretty sure that my mother's siblings raised each other, because there were 12 children!

5. In the Polynesian Islands, children take care of children

We're not talking any old big brother baby-sitting little sister here. We're talking organized kid collective.

Hopgood writes in her book that adults take the lead in caring for babies in Polynesia, but as soon as a child can walk, he or she is turned over to the care of other children.

"Preschool-aged children learned to calm babies," she wrote, "and toddlers became self-reliant because they were taught that that was the only way they could hang out with the big kids."

Jane and James Ritchie, a husband-and-wife anthropology team, observed a similar phenomenon over decades in New Zealand and the Polynesian Islands. But they don't think it would fly in the United States.

"Indeed in Western societies, the degree of child caretaking that seems to apply in most of Polynesia would probably be regarded as child neglect and viewed with some horror," they wrote in Growing Up in Polynesia.

Children taking care of children sounds sweet until you realize the caretakers have no life experience.