Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  I felt a lot of that ebb and flow as a parent in Germany. Sophia was the kind of child who would run away to play the instant I left her at kita, only to greet me with a full-barrel run into my arms at the end of the day. She would cower behind my knees at the sound of a loud hand dryer but also climb the highest tree in the park and even the fences—if I let her. More and more, I knew I would have to let her do things that I wasn’t comfortable with, and luckily, along with this realization, I had more and more confidence in her ability to handle new challenges.

  Teaching Kita Skills in the United States

  Even without a German-style preschool or kindergarten, American parents can help emulate some of the lessons taught by kita teachers. We can find opportunities to engage our children’s curiosity by having them do projects of their own choosing at home. It is a great activity for vacations. My kids love doing projects to this day. They pick the topic and decide the ways they are going to find the information, such as going to the library, asking experts, or maybe taking a trip to a special place like a museum or zoo.

  For better discipline and self-control, we can involve children in making the rules of the house—and win an easier road to better behavior that way. Parents can wait before we get involved in their fights, letting them figure it out for themselves, and when they can’t, instead of punishing them, we can ask them questions, as Annika did for Sophia, to help them to see how the other child feels. Young children are naturally self-centered, so this is a good way to help them practice empathy early. Maybe you can’t give your children a kita trip, but there are simple ways to let them have an overnight adventure away from their parents: a sleepover at a friend’s house or a trip to Grandma’s for the weekend.

  What might be trickier is leadership and responsibility, since developing those skills requires that children be among a group of mixed-age children, but perhaps an insightful preschool class or a special club can help.

  For Sophia, I saw it happen over the course of several years in Germany. Sophia went from being a follower in her group of friends, the girl stuck in the middle, to become a real leader. The difference was apparent in her class “country” project. In keeping with their international mission, the kita held an “international week” every year when each group presented the results of their “country” project. The places chosen were usually countries, states, or cities that had some connection to one of the children in the group. The first year Sophia was in this kita, the country was Egypt, which was part of Mariam’s heritage. For the presentation, Sophia dressed as a typical Egyptian kid in a long white shirt. She had a single line to say, and she was excited to participate, telling us facts daily about the pyramids and King Tut. But when it came time to say her line, she became shy, hid behind the teacher, and refused to say anything. The presentation moved on without her.

  Sophia’s last year at kita, the group chose New York City for their project. This time, Sophia dressed up as the Statue of Liberty. She stood tall and told everyone how the statue was a gift from France and greeted immigrants to the United States. She not only delivered her lines well but helped prompt some of the more nervous kids with their lines. So much had changed in a short space of time. Naturally, Sophia was older, but she had also been training to be a leader.

  Sophia’s kita group was mixed-age, so children as young as two were together with six-year-olds. The children were expected to take on more responsibility as they got older, with the oldest children considered to be the leaders of the group. This was part of their preparation for elementary school. “The more we give preschool-age children responsibilities, the more they will feel oriented and secure when they enter school,” Ulrike said.

  For lunch, three tables in the group were set up with different-size chairs. Each year, the children moved up a table, so they all looked forward to the time when they would sit at the “big table.” The older children were given tasks like going to the kitchen to get the snack or the lunch. This was considered a privilege and a sign of trust. No adult went with them to supervise, and if there was any misbehavior, the children involved wouldn’t be allowed to get the meal the next time.

  The older children were also assigned to help a younger child get dressed to go outside. This process taught the older children patience and responsibility for each other—with the side benefit of taking extra pride that they were able to dress themselves alone. For the younger ones, they had a model to look up to who was much closer to their age, someone who had less authority than a parent or teacher, which made getting dressed more fun and less of a power struggle.

  Sophia’s experience of kindergarten would have been much different for her in the United States, where kindergarten is a single-year class attached to a primary school. If she started that year at age five in America, she would have been among the youngest children in the entire school; instead she had the experience of being the oldest leader of an entire group of younger children.

  In Germany, by the time she was six, Sophia had learned how to explore subjects guided by her own curiosity. She had built her social skills, or “character.” She knew how to care for others and resolve conflicts. She was independent and had no trouble being somewhere without her parents, and perhaps most important, Sophia had practiced being a leader, building her self-confidence in a safe, nurturing environment before entering the potentially more intimidating atmosphere of elementary school.

  Sophia did not know how to read beyond a few words here and there. When I anxiously asked whether I should teach her, Annika advised me to wait: that learning to read was something special all the kids learned together in school. That’s not to say that Sophia hadn’t learned any academic skills. She knew her ABC’s. She could write most of her numbers and letters, which she had learned not only through teaching activities but also by copying her friends at kita—she even wrote a few Egyptian characters that Mariam had taught her. She knew how to count to twenty and had even let go of her favorite made-up number “eleventeen.” And somehow, though she’d had no formal language instruction at all, she’d learned how to speak German fluently.

  Sophia, her kita teachers assured me, was now ready for school.

  6

  Starting School

  We brought Sophia to her new school on a Saturday. Our local elementary school was a huge tan stucco building with a red-tiled roof—an architecture style somewhere between rustic villa and insane asylum. We entered the school’s stone courtyard and walked into a crowd of well-dressed German parents and grandparents. Their children, also dressed in their finest clothes, ran in and around the adults. We waited awkwardly in the crowd, exchanging as much polite conversation as our limited German would allow. A little blond girl wearing a traditional German dirndl dress hid behind her father’s legs and stared shyly at my dark-haired Sophia. They didn’t know it yet, but they would soon become best friends.

  Finally, a bell sounded, and we climbed three flights of stairs to a large cafeteria converted to a theater with chairs facing a small stage. A teacher directed our daughter to the front row where the other new first graders were sitting. I walked Sophia to her seat. Because her kita had not been in our neighborhood, she knew no one at this school.

  “Are you OK here by yourself?” I asked. Sophia’s eyes were big, but she waved me away. I left to find my seat with Zac and Ozzie among the other parents in the back, none of us knowing quite what to expect.

  We hadn’t planned on this: on being in Germany long enough for our daughter to start first grade. What was supposed to be a three-year contract for Zac had become a permanent position, and luckily too. It was the height of the recession, and American universities had precious few open positions for scientists. Our house in Oregon still hadn’t sold, and we were on a seemingly endless cycle of bad renters and urgent repairs. I had started using my journalism skills to supplement our income with copyediting and article writing, but for all intents and purposes, we were stuck in Germany.

  There was one big conso
lation: Our children were thriving. Ozzie was fully bilingual and finding his way at the international kita, and Sophia was excited to go through one of the biggest events in every German’s life—einschulung, the start of school.

  When I was a child, the first day of school meant some new clothes and a backpack. My mother took my picture, and she cried. Then I walked into the school. I knew it was a big occasion, but it was nothing compared to the German einschulung.

  In my effort to learn German, I had found a sprachpartner, or “language partner”: Kordula, who was everything and nothing you might expect of a modern native of East Berlin. She was a tall, beautiful blonde who grew up in the GDR and never moved far from home yet had traveled all over the world. Kordula wanted to improve her English to help with her travels, and in turn, she helped me learn such necessary words as schweinehund, literally “pig-dog,” and apparently if you have a large one, you are very lazy. (I’ve seen saltier translations for schweinehund, but I’m sticking with “pig-dog.”) Kordula was also one of my key resources for cultural questions. When I told her that Sophia was starting school, she asked me what I was doing to prepare for the big party.

  “Party?” I asked.

  “Come on!” she said. “Starting school is a big deal! It isn’t in America?”

  “Kind of, but there usually isn’t a party. We celebrate graduation—the end of school.”

  “Only the end?” She looked at me like things must be very sad in America. She held out a thumb and her first two fingers (which is how Germans count). “The three biggest events in your life are einschulung, jugendfeier, and getting married.” This stunned me because the first two words didn’t translate well—and I had to admit I didn’t even know what jugendfeier was. Kordula explained it was a special party at age fourteen, when you were considered no longer a child but an adolescent.

  Kordula was giving me her East German perspective, because jugendfeier was a secular event promoted by the GDR to replace religious confirmation. While most Germans mark age fourteen as the entry into young adulthood, how they do it depends on their religious and regional backgrounds. Einschulung, on the other hand, has deep roots in both the East and West, and it’s celebrated in a similar way at nearly every school nationwide.

  I didn’t want to have a big schweinehund, so I started researching the custom. In the late spring, I noticed that strange “starting school” items appeared in Berlin stores: giant three-foot cardboard cones and monster backpacks, called schulmappen. These hard-shell packs were meant for first graders even though they were wider than a typical six-year-old’s back. Schulmappen came in a variety of themes, such as dinosaurs, fairies, or pirates. The best ones had matching items like a pencil case, called a federtasche, and a snack box, brotdose. Sophia chose an underwater-themed schulmappe with a crab on the front. It cost a whopping €120—and it was not the most expensive one. We swallowed our hesitation at spending so much on a backpack and bought it.

  We’d already received a supply list from her teacher that was incredibly specific, down to the shade of each color pencil. (Sophia would need exactly one dark green pencil, one medium green, and one light green.) I didn’t take Sophia with me to shop for these items as I planned to put some of them in one of those giant cones. I soon found out they were called zuckertüte because traditionally they were filled with sweets, thus the zucker (sugar) in the name.

  I investigated the cone tradition on the Internet and by asking friends—because I couldn’t imagine any child needed that much candy. I learned that the zuckertüte filling could include school supplies and gifts like stuffed animals. Another common item to give was a watch or an alarm clock, so they could start learning to track their own schedules—and no doubt work on the German value of being pünktlich (“punctual”).

  Thankfully, we were pünktlich for Sophia’s einschulung at the school, because the room filled up fast with parents holding up smartphones for pictures. The principal, a white-haired man with a mustache, got up on the stage and spoke at length about the importance of the day. With so many proud relatives crammed together on a summer day, the room grew quite warm. Ozzie squirmed next to me. I couldn’t see Sophia. I wondered how she was faring, if she was wilting from the heat or anxiety.

  Finally, the principal finished his speech, and a troop of children dressed in a rainbow of colors took over the stage. They began to dance silently. From the imagery, I gathered it was about the passing of the seasons. The dance ended, and the children lined up on one side of the stage. Each picked a sunflower out of a nearby bucket. A teacher started to call the new first graders one by one to the stage. Before I could worry if Sophia would be too shy to get up on the stage, there she was, taking a flower from the second-grade boy who would be her partner-kind to help her transition into her mixed-grade class.

  Then Sophia was gone again—leaving with her new classmates to have a group picture taken. The parents were all directed to the courtyard where we were served champagne in plastic glasses. When Sophia returned to us, we presented her with her zuckertüte. It was nearly as big as she was.

  After the school celebration, most of the German kids went home to have big parties with their entire families. Being expats, we had no extended family nearby, and many of our friends were having an einschulung that day as well. Families of new first graders across the entire city of Berlin all celebrated the start of school on the same day. Our little family walked home to have lunch together, a bit stunned by the magnitude of the whole thing.

  This event marked a big shift in our time in Germany. Until now, both of our children had been at a bilingual kita, and as American parents, we moved easily through a half-English world. Many of Sophia’s friends had chosen the private Berlin Bilingual School to continue their German-English education. After some debate, we had decided against this path in favor of our local public school up the street. It had a great reputation, it was close and free, and most of all, we hoped it would give Sophia a firm grasp of her new language. This school would be all German, all the time.

  Even though it was a public school, we were pleased to find that it operated on a Montessori model, where children self-direct a lot of their own learning. In fact, many Berlin primary schools follow this model. Sophia’s first three years would be spent in a mixed, first-through-third-grade class. Still, if we hadn’t liked the educational program of our local school, we could have applied for a spot in one of the other public schools in the city, which have a range of approaches. Some have a special focus, such as sports or music. My friend Taska chose a public elementary school with a math and science focus when her son turned six.

  There were also public international or bilingual schools, including a British school. Many expats covet a spot at the American JFK public school in southwest Berlin, where children are taught a curriculum similar to what they would receive in the States. We could even band together with other parents and start our own, as the parents who’d created Berlin Bilingual School had done. One thing we couldn’t choose, however, was to keep Sophia home and teach her ourselves.

  Homeschooling is illegal in Germany. When the law was challenged by the Konrad family, several German courts ruled against them, and in 2006, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the German ban on homeschooling. An appeals court in the German state of Baden-Württemberg ruled that “Schools represented society, and it was in the children’s interests to become part of that society. The parents’ right to provide education did not go so far as to deprive their children of that experience.” The homeschool issue aside, this argument is revealing: first it shows that Germans feel children have the right to the company of other children and adults who are not their parents, and second, that by the tender age of six, the government views children as having rights that go beyond their parents’ control. So that wonderful einschulung ceremony also meant that a big separation had begun.

  Play School

  The separation between parents and child marked by the start of school was
reinforced a few weeks later when Sophia’s entire class went on a weeklong trip together. I had gotten used to overnights through the kita experience, but those were one or two nights—this was an entire week, for a six-year-old. I hadn’t experienced anything like that as a kid. Yet, in Berlin, this class trip early in the year was a common practice at primary schools.

  The purpose was mainly for the children to bond with one another. There would be little formal instruction that week. The children would stay in cabins in a nearby forest, go hiking and swimming, cook, and make crafts—basically play. Of course, Sophia was all for it. She packed her own bag days before the time to leave. As instructed, I gave her a little money for her wallet, so she could buy treats at the camp’s kiosk.

  When the day came to leave, she went with her new class without so much as a backward glance. Zac and I missed her terribly, and so did Ozzie. We were to expect no phone calls, though the kids all wrote a postcard home. I got hers the day she came back, all tanned, scabby-kneed, and happy.

  I tried to pry information out of her about the trip and got little beyond that they “played” and what sort of sweets she did or did not buy at the kiosk. She admitted that the nights were a bit hard, but she hadn’t been miserable. I started to hear her talk about more classmates, and soon it became obvious that she had a new best friend, Maya, the little blond girl we’d seen at her einschulung.