by Sara Zaske
While the teachers paid close attention to Ozzie’s development and sometimes guided him, they resisted interfering. One of my favorite projects was a daylong observation of Ozzie where one kita teacher shadowed him and reported on what he did all day. Here is a sample (“you” refers to Ozzie):
“You see Finn going into the cupboard and closing the door. You run there, peeking into it through a hole. Finn is starting to giggle and so you are sharing a laugh too! Now Finn pushes open the door and then you close it. You are both having fun and repeat this game many times. But when Finn gets too wild and gives the door a real hard push you get a bump on your head. Now you are crying a bit. Fortunately, Paul joins the game and you get distracted. Now the hide-and-seek game continues, but you have learned to be more cautious and you make sure to stand farther away from the cupboard door!”
This passage was typical of the kita’s approach to the kids. The kita teacher carefully observed what the children did but didn’t hurry to intervene at the first sign of trouble. My impulse would have been to run over the minute I heard crying, but reading the whole story, I can see that doing that would have not only spoiled Ozzie’s fun but also interrupted his learning process.
In the United States, most of the child-care workers I came into contact with had little formal training. Educational standards for child care vary from state to state, but most don’t require much more than a high school diploma, and some states don’t have any education requirements at all for entry-level jobs in the field, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Germany, on the other hand, all kita teachers are trained professionals: most go through two to four years of specialized education, as well as an internship, before taking a job in a kita. I felt assured my son was in good hands. This education also meant that when the kita teachers brought up an issue Ozzie was having, they had real ideas about how to solve it. Far from being threatened, I found this to be a great help.
Zac and I now had new allies in parenting. As I had already learned from Ozzie’s sleep troubles, we didn’t always know the right thing to do, not by instinct, not from our experiences with Sophia, not even from reading parenting books. The books didn’t talk back, and they did not know my son’s individual quirks and his everyday activities, but his kita teachers did. Anyone who has ever tried to live up to the ideal of the parents who are everything for their child knows this quest can be awfully quixotic—and lonely. With kita, we didn’t have to be so alone.
It’s telling that a language as precise as German doesn’t have a word that literally means parenting. The word often used is erziehung, which means education or upbringing, and kita educators are called “erzieher(in)” (the added “in” is the feminine form) as opposed to “lehrer(in),” which means “teacher.” This term seems to indicate that the job of raising a child is not limited to the mutter (“mother”) or even the eltern (“parents”).
Many German experts back up the idea that raising a child isn’t only the job of the mother or the parents. Karl Heinz Brisch is a German psychologist whose research focuses on the importance of early parent-child bonding. He seems to be nearly as pro attachment theory as William and Martha Sears. Brisch even has his own trademarked training program, called SAFE in German and in English, to promote “secure attachment,” and he rails against the fears some German parents have of “spoiling” their babies by being too responsive to their cries. Yet Brisch still believes in quality child care. The psychologist told the German newspaper Die Zeit that after his lectures people would sometimes approach him to tell him that they agree that “the children belong with their mother!”
“That’s not what I am saying,” Brisch explained. “Children need emotionally available caregivers with whom they can securely bond. Those caregivers could certainly include day-care staff in addition to the parents.”
In contrast to Brisch’s attitude, the Searses’ books offer this warning within a chapter on “Working and Parenting” in The Baby Book: “The most important contributor to a baby’s physical, emotional, and intellectual development is the responsiveness of the mother to the cues of her infant.” The message couldn’t be more clear: the Searses believe it is specifically the mother who must be the most responsive, and if she is not there because she is working, she is doing damage.
The German parenting icon Remo Largo points out that the idea of the mother as the sole caregiver is an idea that came about after World War II, and that babies are actually predisposed to bond with more than one person. “Although it varies from child to child, children are generally able to adjust to different caregivers even during their first year of life,” Largo said in an interview with the popular German women’s magazine Brigitte. “Nature set it up this way because not every mother is able to care for her child—in the past, many women died in childbirth.”
Instead of focusing on who is doing the caregiving, Largo argues that the quality of care is really what matters. This is the same point that Brisch makes as well, and he advocates for improvements in the German nursery system, including better training and pay for the instructors and a higher ratio of caregivers to children.
Quality of Care
In the United States, the day-care system has a particularly bad reputation. Part of the persistent negative perception may be a hangover from the rash of child-care sex abuse allegations in the 1980s and 1990s. A good number of the cases relied on the testimony of small children, which today many believe was unduly influenced or even coerced by parents, police, and psychologists. As the PBS Frontline documentary has chronicled, many of the charges from those cases have since been overturned. Yet the damage had been done, and those horror stories destroyed a lot of trust in American child-care institutions. No doubt it also put a chilling effect on a profession already hindered by low pay.
Today, you would be hard-pressed to find many day-care workers in the United States who are male (only 5.1 percent are men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). Anti-abuse advocate groups such as Stop It Now! advise day-care centers to institute a two-adult rule, which means no adult should be alone with a child at any point. This recommendation is meant to help prevent abuse (or accusations thereof), but as a policy, it seems pretty impractical for any but the most fully staffed day-care facility.
The worry about abuse accusations can also inhibit child-care workers from forming a caring relationship with children. An American colleague once complained to me that the child-care teachers never hugged the children. It seems like it would be awfully hard for small children to bond with caregivers who are afraid to touch them.
Despite all this, most American child-care situations are not, in fact, horrible. According to a landmark 2007 National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) study, most child-care settings in the United States provide “fair” care, with about 10 percent providing very high-quality care. The NICHD defines positive caregiving as a host of activities including having a positive attitude, encouraging children, and listening, talking, and singing to children, as well as having positive physical contact. All of the child care found to be of fair quality did some of these things, some of the time. While far from a rousing endorsement, the NICHD study also found fewer than 10 percent provided very low-quality care. In short, most of it isn’t bad.
This same study found the amount of time that children spent in child care had no positive or negative relation to their readiness for school. Instead, by far the most predictive factor of children’s success was not whether they were in child care but their family’s characteristics, such as their parents’ education level or ethnic background.
The developmental psychologists Hiltrud Otto and Heidi Keller go even further in defense of early child care. They point out in a chapter of the book Contemporary Parenting that not only the NICHD study but also the European Child Care and Education Study (ECCE) and the German National Study of Education and Care in Germany (NUBBEK) “did not show any negative effect of children’s day-care experiences on thei
r development, no matter how early extra-familial day care started, how much time the children spent in care, and what the format of this care was.” In fact, if any effects were noticeable, Otto and Keller noted they were positive and children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds “profited from day care substantially.”
I wish I had known this way back at the start, when I first put Sophia in child care in the United States. We were lucky to find good child-care spots for her, and she had bonded well with people other than me: her father, her grandmother, and several good child-care teachers. Still, I felt like a bad mother. Although I dismissed comments like my mother’s “How could I leave her?” as overly traditional, they still echoed in my head. I should have felt more confident that leaving her at child care did her no harm, that it might even be good for her. She had quality care and benefited from new people and experiences. She also knew from an early age that I would always come back.
At both the German kitas that Sophia attended, they had a settling-in period for children of all ages. Each time for Sophia, it took only minutes, not hours or days. She was used to adapting to new people and situations.
It took Ozzie much longer to see that kita was a good thing. While he loved the toys and kids, he did not want me to leave the room. We had no extended family in Germany, and because of Zac’s commute, he had less time to spend with Ozzie than he’d had with Sophia. One of the first questions Ozzie’s kita teachers asked me was whether he had ever had a babysitter. I had to think about it for several minutes before realizing how exclusively I had been with him. Ozzie hadn’t been without me for more than an hour or two, for an entire year. Naturally, that made the adjustment to kita all the harder. It took nearly the full six weeks, but he did finally settle in and learned to enjoy kita without me there.
When my mother came to visit us in Berlin, she said she smelled another woman’s perfume on her grandson. It was true. I’d noticed it before, but it didn’t bother me. “That means someone has been hugging him,” I said, giving him a squeeze myself. “You have to admit he is very huggable.”
Child-Care Benefits
We don’t have all the benefits of the German system in the United States, of course; the cost of such care is still a huge obstacle for many families. It’s clear we need political action to make child care more affordable for everyone, including working- and middle-class families who tend to get squeezed the most. While it’s popular to talk about improving access to child care in politics—especially when it’s promoted as “universal pre-school” or “early childhood education”—real progress has been slow. The biggest hurdle seems to be the expense, but Germany is proof it can be done without breaking the bank. Still, some individual states have implemented programs, including Oklahoma, Florida, and Georgia. If more parents, on all sides of the political spectrum, started telling their representatives how important the issue is to them and joined national and local advocacy groups like Child Care Aware of America, Children Now in California, or the Campaign for Children in New York City, we could make quality, subsidized care a reality in the United States.
Even without a political change, American mothers can look at the German example and at least lose the guilt. If you can find a quality child-care center with caring, educated staff, your child will have more advantages than a child raised solely at home does, including new experiences and relationships. You will have partners in raising her, and more time and space to become a better parent yourself. Your child will also be taking a big step toward developing more independence.
Within a few months, Ozzie loved going to kita. Not getting ready for it, per se (I have yet to meet a toddler who likes to get dressed to go anywhere), but once we walked in the door, he’d be off playing before I would have much chance to say good-bye.
On his second birthday, we proudly arrived with cupcakes for everyone. I knew from other birthdays that most parents didn’t stay for the party, but I lingered for a moment to take a picture. I watched as all the tiny toddlers gathered to sing “Happy Birthday” and “Hoch soll er leben!” (“High may he live!”) Ozzie sat down on a kita teacher’s lap. She gave him a hug. He focused on the cupcake with the lit candle, and when he blew it out, he didn’t even look up at me. I had a funny feeling, almost like I was an intruder. I took my picture and left, unsettled.
As I walked home, I consoled myself: later that day I would pick him up again, and we would have our own family celebration. Ozzie still spent more time with his family than at kita, and more time with me, his mother, than with anyone else … wasn’t it a good thing to give him some time away? I did not need to be there for every single moment in his life, not even for every single celebration (I would soon realize that my kids would have several parties every birthday). I was still a little sad about missing this event, but I was also starting to see that the cultural compulsion I felt to be with him all the time might not be the best thing for him—that maybe it was healthier that he should start having some of his own experiences without the constant presence of his parents.
5
The Democratic Kindergarten
In Sophia’s new kita classroom, African snails the size of a human head were crawling on the tabletops. My daughter, now four, would be attending this kita group in a room down the hall from Ozzie’s toddler room. This would be her second kita in Germany, but I hoped this one would be different from the first and include more preparation for school. When I asked about the giant snails, Annika, the head teacher, told me they were for the class’s snail project. I smiled and nodded like a polite American, but I remember thinking what an odd project that was. After all, how much could there be to learn about snails? Maybe the children were also learning about the letter s, I thought hopefully.
I thought wrong. Annika wasn’t teaching the alphabet in a creative way. She hadn’t even picked the project. The children had. I didn’t know it at the time, but this kita, like many kitas in Germany, followed what’s known as “situationansatz,” which translates to “situation approach.” In practice, it means that the kita teachers observe the situation—what games the children play, scenes they act out, or real events in their lives. Then they look for learning opportunities that arise out of what the children are already interested in.
Sophia was in the last years of kita, nearing the age for kindergarten, yet there were none of the typical things I’d expect to find in a U.S. pre-school or kindergarten: no alphabet letters on the wall, no cork boards displaying sheets of addition problems or practice sentences. The ambitious American parent in me worried a little. I knew that back home kids were learning academic skills earlier and earlier. I’d read scary articles about entrance exams for preschool and about how kindergarten had become the new first grade.
Here I was in the land that invented kindergarten, and it looked like the Germans had gone in the exact opposite direction. I could see through the big windows at the back of the room that all the kids were outside playing. Just like at Sophia’s previous kita, most of what the kids did here was play and play some more.
At this point, I wasn’t too worried about academics. Sophia was still four. What I cared most about was that she was happy. She’d been a little sad to leave her other kita and anxious about going to a new place. Annika talked with Sophia for a few minutes, then invited two girls inside to meet her, a German Egyptian girl named Mariam and a German Australian girl named Emma who were within a year of Sophia’s age and fluent in both German and English.
I watched as the three became friends in the space of five minutes. They showed Sophia around the room, and then asked to show her the “garden,” which is what Germans generally call the outside play space at kitas. Before I knew it, Sophia was running away from me with a half a wave of her hand as a good-bye. That was about all the “settling in” she needed.
Despite the dominance of play, I soon saw that the kita had some structure. The children were supposed to be in the room by nine a.m. for morgenkreis (“morning circle”)
when the instructors and children sat on the floor, sang songs, and talked about what was going to happen that day. There was a set time for lunch and snack, a resting time (although no kid was forced to sleep), and a table time for quiet work like coloring or games. Still, the kids spent the majority of the day in the playroom or the garden, pretty much doing whatever they wanted.
This was intentional. The teachers all expressed that the children learned best by playing with other children, with little emphasis on academic skills.
“I think the most important thing they learn in kita is social and emotional development, to be school-ready,” Annika said. “It’s not really learning ABC’s or numbers or things like that—it’s knowing how to communicate, knowing their strengths and weaknesses, knowing how to get help, how to solve problems and conflicts. These are the basics they’ll need for when they start school.”
When I asked the kita’s principal, Ulrike, what the children should know before starting school, she also emphasized similar traits versus cognitive skills. “They should have a lot of competencies, such as being curious,” she said. “At the same time, they should learn to accept mistakes—that mistakes are there in order to learn and shouldn’t frustrate you but lead you to another idea. It’s a really important first step to being willing and motivated to learn.” Ulrike also talked about developing “an inner drive,” so children would want to find out things for themselves, and about giving the children more responsibility.
