Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  7

  No Bad Weather

  One winter afternoon in Berlin, I was having lunch with a Canadian friend when I saw a woman with a stroller and an older couple approach the restaurant. The woman rolled the stroller up next to the window, set the brake, and then walked into the restaurant—without her baby. The older couple, probably the child’s grandparents, didn’t give the baby carriage a second glance. The trio chose a seat by the window and picked up their menus.

  “They’re going to leave the baby outside?” I asked my friend.

  “I know. They do that all the time here,” she said in a low voice. “If the baby’s sleeping, they don’t want to wake her up. In Canada, you could never do that. It’s too cold.”

  “I guess they aren’t worried anyone would walk off with the baby!” I said. Even as I made that remark I realized how ridiculous that sounded. It was highly unlikely that a wacko would come up to the restaurant in broad daylight and make off with the infant, but I’d heard stories of baby stealing, and they loomed huge in my mind. Larger, of course, than the reality. In thirty-two years, from 1982 to 2015, 300 infants were abducted in the United States—that’s less than ten a year—according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. (Thankfully, the vast majority have also been recovered.) The odds of a baby getting hit by lightning are higher than her being abducted.

  My reaction wasn’t fact-based; it was cultural. The practice of leaving a sleeping baby unattended for even a short time is so antithetical to the American idea of safety that when a Danish mother left her small child outside a restaurant in New York City, she was arrested for it. But like many northern Europeans, Berliners place a high value on children getting fresh air, so leaving a baby outside is considered the healthy thing to do.

  The importance of fresh air has deep roots in Europe. In one of the earlier versions of the Three Bears fairy tale recorded in the 1800s, Goldilocks is said to have jumped out the window, specifically left open because the bears “being good, tidy bears, always opened their bedroom window in the morning.” Two centuries later, I found a clause in my German rental contract saying we should open the windows to air out the house on a daily basis. Every German I know did this, even in the dead of winter. They also made sure their children went outside every day for their required fresh air, no matter the season.

  There’s a German saying that translates roughly as “There’s no bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.” (“Es gibt kein schlechtes Wetter, es gibt nur falsche Kleidung.”) When I left the restaurant that day, I saw that the sleeping baby in the stroller was under a puffy blanket and wearing a hat, mittens, and a snowsuit. She was definitely suitably dressed.

  Germans love the outdoors. Berlin’s restaurants and cafés keep their outside seating open as long as possible, leaving blankets out for customers who like to eat draussen even when it’s chilly. Germans also celebrate Christmas outside at open-air fairs called Weihnachtsmärkte. (Germans call the holidays around Christ’s birth Weihnachten, or “holy nights.”) In public squares throughout Berlin, weihnachtsmärkte open up in late November and stay open through Christmas day. Many of the markets feature activities like ice skating and carnival rides, and all of them have rows of wooden huts selling crafts and food: bratwurst cooked on open fires and holiday treats such as lebkuchen, a spicy ginger cookie, and stöllen, a sweet sugar-covered fruit bread too good to call fruitcake. To stay warm, adults drink steaming mugs of mulled spiced wine called glühwein, and kids have the choice of hot punch or cocoa.

  We loved this tradition and went to as many of these markets as we could every Christmas. I have a picture of Ozzie at his first market, barely three months old, bundled in the stroller asleep. Then, another year, enjoying a cocoa with Sophia, and still later, jumping on a giant trampoline, soaring high into the fresh, cold winter air.

  Granted, Berlin is warmer than you might expect. Like much of Europe, Germany benefits from the warm air brought by the Atlantic Ocean Gulf Stream. The snows only hit Berlin a few times a winter, and some winters have no snow at all. The only days that are truly bitter arrive when the winds shift and blow from the east—what happens, I’ve been told, when “Mother Russia lifts her skirts.”

  Even when it is cold, rarely does the temperature prevent German children from going outside. Year round, kita kids are playing in the garden for a good part of the day, and primary school children are sent out into the hof. They go outside even if it is raining or snowing.

  At our kita, as soon as he could walk, Ozzie was bundled up along with the other toddlers and sent outside to muck around in the soggy play area. I was introduced to the necessity of having two pairs of raincoats, rain pants, and boots, so the children would never be without their full gear. In the winter, the children required snow pants or full body snowsuits as well as gloves, scarves, and mütze (“winter hats”), which covered the ears, or simply a knit stocking that covered the entire head with a hole cut out for the child’s face. Around town, all those German grandmothers who were so prone to give my children candy were also quick to give me unsolicited criticism on how inappropriately I had dressed my children for current weather conditions.

  The German value on the outdoors is reflected in the sheer number of outside places even within a big city like Berlin, which boasts 1,850 public playgrounds, not counting the play spaces found within the city’s forests or next to its public pools. Compare this to the 1,700 recreation areas in New York City, which has more than twice the population. While many U.S. cities have one giant park, Central Park in New York or the Golden Gate in San Francisco, Berlin has several huge green spaces in addition to the historic Tiergarten. Each neighborhood has at least one big park, such as Volkspark Friedrichshain in our neighborhood and Treptower Park to the south of us, which are both around 200 acres each. Berliners love their open space so much that they successfully fought off housing-development plans at the former Tempelhof airport in the southern part of the city, and in 2010, the city created a massive park out of the 984 acres of airfields.

  As newcomers to Berlin, we visited a different park every weekend all over the city. We flew kites at Tempelhof, picnicked at Tiergarten, and climbed the waterfalls at Viktoria Park in Kreuzberg. One of our favorite discoveries was the Arabian Nights–themed playground at Volkspark Hasenheide in the southeastern district of Neukölln in Berlin. The playground features carved wooden figures of genies and sultans interspersed among the play structures, including a two-story wooden boat, a multi-sided climbing wall, and a “flying carpet” made of long stretches of bouncy rubber.

  Sophia loved our weekend playground excursions and explored many play structures at the various parks. Just like at kita, she grew braver on the playground as she grew older. It took several visits to Mitte, the central district of Berlin, but she finally scaled the house-size rope-and-metal climbing pyramid we found there. By far her biggest challenge was still the dragon sitting in our own neighborhood park.

  For nearly a year, she repeated her climb up and down that dragon without going into its mouth or trying the slides. Then one day while I was sitting with Ozzie in the sand, I heard her call out, “Mama! Mama!” I stood up and looked around. Where had she gone? I raced over to the tunnels thinking maybe she was stuck.

  “Mama! Look up!” I did, and there she was waving at me from between the dragon’s teeth. A few minutes later she came flying down the tall slide like it was no big thing. I couldn’t help noticing the light in her eyes and the way she stood a little taller. She walked around like she was the queen of the park. She had conquered the dragon.

  This courage was catching. It wasn’t too long until I heard another “Mama! Mama!” over my head. This time Sophia was in the dragon’s mouth with three-year-old Ozzie at her side.

  America Inside

  American kids don’t have as many opportunities to conquer a dragon—at least outside of a video game—because our kids spend much more time indoors than their German peers do. About 77 perce
nt of German kids ages three to ten play outside more than five times a week according to a 2013 Robert Koch Institute study. In contrast, out of a group of American mothers surveyed by physical education professor Rhonda Clements, only 31 percent reported that their kids played outside every day.

  The American children who do get outside spend a short amount of time there. University of Michigan researchers surveyed 2,017 families with children and found that on average children ages six to seventeen spent less than an hour per week on “outdoor activities.” (This excludes about three hours a week in sports, which may or may not be outside, and which are structured activities rather than free play.) What are children doing instead? They are spending increased time at school, studying, watching TV, and using the computer. These last two activities alone took up more than sixteen hours of children’s time per week.

  The problem with the loss of outside time is obvious in the size of our children’s waistlines, but there are internal impacts as well. In a 2011 article for the American Journal of Play, psychologist Peter Gray noted that in the past fifty years, children’s time for free play, particularly outdoors, has declined, while at the same time, “measures of psychopathology in children and adolescents—including indices of anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism—have continually increased.” In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv claims that our children are in danger of what he calls the “nature deficit disorder,” an alienation from the natural world that has a host of ill effects, including diminished use of senses, increased crime rates, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional problems.

  The diagnosis rates of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the United States have increased 3 percent each year from 1997 to 2006. By 2011, approximately 11 percent, or 6.4 million, American kids (ages six to seventeen) had been diagnosed with the condition, according to the CDC. The disorder is defined as having trouble paying attention, controlling impulsive behavior, or being overly active. While many of these kids are treated with medication, a 2011 study published in Applied Psychology identified a simple, low-cost method to alleviating some of the symptoms: “exposure to green spaces.”

  It is interesting to note that while Germany has also experienced a surge of ADHD diagnoses, the rate is still lower than in the United States: 4.8 percent over a child’s lifetime, according to research published in 2008 by German psychologist Michael Huss and colleagues. Could the difference be explained simply by the fact that German children have more free time to play outside?

  In the United States, children can’t get a break. When I went to elementary school, we had an outside recess at least twice a day, just as my children enjoyed in Germany, but that has changed. About 40 percent of U.S. school districts have cut down or eliminated recess, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This has happened despite the studies that have found outside activity to be important to children’s ability to learn. For instance, a 2009 study in the journal Pediatrics found that kids who had recess behaved better in the classroom and therefore were more ready to learn than kids who did not.

  It used to be common-sense parenting in America to send kids outside to play every day. I remember many days when my mother would turn off the TV and tell me to go outside. I grew up in a town near Buffalo, New York, which is legendary for its record snowfalls, so in the winter it was a huge ordeal to get outside. I remember resisting efforts to get me out of the house, but once I was out, winter or summer, I played for hours. I suspect many kids growing up before the 1990s had this same experience. In fact in the survey by Professor Clements that I noted earlier, of the mothers who reported such low play rates in their own children, a vast majority, 70 percent, remembered playing outside themselves as children every day.

  So what has changed in America that has driven children indoors? I’ve read an array of articles and books by child development experts and cultural observers who blame this change on a number of factors: the hyper-emphasis on academics; the prioritization of organized sports over free outdoor play; increased time spent with electronic media, namely TV, but also smartphones, computers, and video games; and exaggerated fears that unsupervised children outdoors will be abducted. I say exaggerated because of these facts: an estimated 105 children were victims of the stereotypical stranger abduction in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Each incident is horrifying to be sure, but as a statistical risk for the more than 70 million children in the United States, again it’s in the “hit by lightning” territory. (It’s more common that children will be abused or abducted by someone they already know, which is a problem that cannot be addressed by keeping children indoors.)

  German culture has been hit with many of the same pressures and fears. As noted earlier, the country has had a number of academic “shocks,” which has added to the already high stakes in German schools. Fussball (soccer) is a national obsession. Computers and smartphones are everywhere in the country, which is home to Europe’s biggest telecommunications company, Deutsche Telecom. Germany has also had its share of child abduction cases. Although extremely rare, like it is in the United States, each incident is publicized in sensational German tabloids, stoking parents’ fears. Yet, in Germany, parents and schools have not responded the same way that they have in the United States. There’s been no mass movement by parents or educators to keep children inside for any of these reasons—most Germans seem to feel that the benefits of letting their children enjoy the fresh air outside far outweigh the risks.

  Germans and Free Nature

  Whenever I’ve posed the question directly to a German parent—“How can you let your children have so much freedom?”—I’d get a similar answer: it’s difficult, they’d say, but necessary. It’s what is best for their kids.

  Cat Gerlach, a German mother of three children, two of whom have special needs, wrote to me after reading one of my articles to point out that giving kids freedom is probably the hardest thing a parent has to do. “Of course, I would have loved to shadow every single step my kids took (which would have been impossible since I’ve got three), but I forced myself not to,” she said. “It’s not good to stifle your child’s interests.”

  Cat doesn’t live in a big city like Berlin. She lives in a small village, the kind of place where everyone knows each other and doesn’t bother to lock their doors. Cat told me she doesn’t have to worry when her children play outside. Since two of her children have mental disabilities, they would occasionally get lost, but Cat felt confident that “if they end up in a place they shouldn’t be, one of the neighbors will pick them up and bring them back.”

  This neighborhood trust may seem to apply only in a small village, but I’ve also seen it in action in Berlin. For instance, one time after leaving a playground with Sophia, we came across an anxious little girl no older than six, dancing with impatience on the curb. “Can you help me cross the street?” she asked me in German. I understood her words, but I was still confused.

  “Where is your mother?” I asked. She pointed up, and there across the street was a woman leaning out of a third-floor window. She waved to me. This was obviously routine for them, even if it seemed odd to me, so I looked both directions to make sure the road was clear and sent the girl across.

  “Sag Danke!” her mother shouted at her.

  The girl turned back to me. “Danke!” she said.

  The German culture at large seems to encourage children to feel free rather than afraid when they are outside in public, even when they are naked. In the summer, small children run around naked at almost every Berlin playground that has a bit of water. The first hot summer in Berlin, I supplied Sophia with a bathing suit to take to kita. The next day she asked me if she had to use it. “I’m the only one wearing one,” she told me.

  “Well, you don’t have to wear one if you don’t want to,” I told her. And she didn’t. On hot summer days, I would often come to pick up my kids at kita to find eighteen naked kids splashing
in the outside water play area. It was fun to see their joy. They were so comfortable in their own skins. There was no self-consciousness, no shame.

  In Germany, nudity, in general, is much more accepted than it is in the United States. The German freikörperkultur (“free body culture”) is more widespread and mainstream than the nudist movement is in the United States. Nudist sections are common at lake and seaside beaches in Germany, and they don’t usually have any privacy screens to separate one area from the other. Even if it’s not a nudist area, adults often change into their suits right on the beach.

  Going to the beach, whether naked or not, is a favorite vacation for Germans. Every summer, they drive to the beaches on the north coast or fly south. So many Germans hit the Mediterranean beaches in Spain and Greece that in some places you can hear more German spoken than Spanish or Greek. Despite the hardworking stereotype, Germans take a lot of vacations. They have as many as six weeks off a year, and taking at least four weeks of vacation (twenty working days) is mandated by law. That’s for everyone from doctors and lawyers to store clerks and garbage collectors—and generally, Germans take vacation for several weeks at a time. I remember once telling Kordula excitedly about the weeklong vacation we’d planned to the Spanish island of Mallorca. “Only one week!” she said. “You will have no time to relax before you have to go home again!”