Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  When Skenazy did write about it, the world went crazy. Talk-show hosts and parenting experts condemned her for endangering her son. Skenazy launched her own counterattack starting a blog and later writing a hilarious book called Free Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts With Worry) lambasting America’s paranoid parenting culture that sees a child predator lurking in every bush.

  Skenazy makes a strong argument for giving children more freedom, based on common sense and statistics: for example, she often notes that the level of crime in America, of all kinds, is at the same level as 1963 when children regularly walked alone to school.

  Eight years after her son’s trip on the subway, Skenazy is still giving speeches about allowing children more independence and fielding calls from parents who have been investigated or arrested for letting their children walk places by themselves or even for leaving them in a car for a few minutes. Skenazy, who says she is simply an old-fashioned parent, is surprised that her ideas are still considered extreme.

  “What continues to fascinate me is the idea that the second your child is unsupervised they are automatically in danger,” Skenazy told me when I spoke with her in the spring of 2016. “And that’s so obviously not true, because our parents let us walk to school and play outside back when the crime rate was higher than it is today.”

  Skenazy’s free-range movement has gained proponents not only among parents but also with some policy makers. U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) inserted a special clause in the 2015 Every Child Succeeds education bill that made it clear nothing in the law would “prohibit a child from traveling to and from school on foot or by car, bus, or bike when the parents of the child have given permission” or that their parents would face criminal charges for doing so. Unfortunately, these few lines in a federal law will not suddenly set thousands of American children free to walk to school. It doesn’t preempt state or local laws, and it is extremely difficult to change a parenting trend that has been building for decades.

  In 1969, 47.7 percent of kindergarteners through eighth graders in America walked or biked to school. In 2009, that number had dropped to 12.7 percent, according to a study on U.S. school travel headed up by University of North Carolina professor Noreen McDonald. While the study doesn’t specify whether the children walked by themselves, anecdotally many people from earlier generations recall walking to school alone or with friends. Either way, it’s clear that today our children are usually with their parents because they are in the car being chaperoned to school as well as to athletic activities, music lessons, and “play dates” with friends. German children also spend more time in the car than they used to, but according to the Policy Studies Institute (PSI), 61 percent of German primary school children were still walking to school in 2010, and if what I saw in Berlin is any indication, from about second grade on they are walking without their parents.

  One of the most common arguments I’ve heard against letting children walk and play by themselves is that we are now living in “more dangerous times.” Not only do U.S. crime statistics disprove that notion, but Germany provides a powerful counterexample. If another modern, first world country with its own share of crime and difficult problems can still let the majority of its children walk to school and around neighborhoods by themselves, then the dramatic drop in children’s freedom to move isn’t a fact of modern life but of culture.

  People often assume that Germans and other Europeans let their children do more by themselves because there is less crime in Europe. I spoke with researcher Paolo Buonanno, who has analyzed crime rates in different countries, to find out if that’s true. The vice chancellor for research at University of Bergamo in Italy, Buonanno helped author an in-depth paper comparing crime between major European countries and the United States. He told me that making such comparisons can be difficult because of disparate reporting rates among countries. For instance, crime seems to be awfully high in Nordic countries, according to official statistics, but that’s primarily because people tend to report crimes more often in places like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark than in other countries.

  Buonanno and his colleagues work to adjust for those differences. They found out that crime in both the United States and Europe has been dropping in recent years. Total crime in Europe, and in Germany, is actually still higher than it is in the United States—in all categories except murder. That’s one scary category. Buonanno and his colleagues say one likely explanation is the prevalence of guns in American society and “the fact that many types of crime in the United States tend to be committed with the use of guns and that’s very different from many European countries.”

  It’s not like Germany has no guns. In fact, it has the fourth-highest rate of gun ownership in the world, but prospective gun owners have to pass many steps before they can purchase a weapon, including a criminal background check and a test of their knowledge of the weapon. If they are younger than twenty-five, they have to take a psychological exam. These measures seem to make a big difference. In the United States, there were 10.14 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in 2014, according to GunPolicy.org. In Germany, the rate was 1.01. If we truly want to make our country safer for children, we don’t need to lock kids indoors; we should enact gun-safety measures similar to those in Germany.

  Regardless, most people living in American suburbs don’t have to worry about their children being gunned down on the tree-lined streets of their neighborhoods, but I can imagine that in some neighborhoods that may be a real fear. Buonanno also pointed out that crime in the United States is very segregated to specific areas, with pockets of high-crime areas in a city that also has low-crime areas that are “as safe as many European cities.” If you live in a low-crime area, you can be assured that it’s probably as safe for your child to walk to school as it would be in Berlin.

  I have to admit I didn’t initially see Berlin as particularly safe, but the parents all around me thought the risk was manageable. While I was trying to convince myself to let my daughter walk the four blocks to her Berlin school by herself, my German friend Susan had started sending her two oldest children, now eight and eleven, to their Waldorf school, which was some distance from their apartment, on the bus, by themselves—and not the school bus, the public city bus. Judith’s daughter started taking the bus to and from her school every day by herself in second grade. A colleague of Zac’s let his nine-year-old son take the U-Bahn (the Berlin subway) to his school every day. They received no condemnation like Skenazy experienced, because this was a fairly common thing for children to do in Germany.

  In a 2015 multicountry survey of children’s independent mobility conducted by PSI, Germany ranked the highest out of sixteen countries in the practice of letting children take public buses by themselves. Overall in terms of the freedom to move independently, German children were second only to children in Finland, where children as young as seven walk and bike alone day or night. (The United States was not included in the survey, but notably three other English-speaking countries ranked poorly: England, Ireland, and Australia came in at 7, 12, and 13, respectively.)

  Why German Children Walk Alone

  German parents are not cavalier about sending their kids out into the big outside world by themselves. When I interviewed one German mother, Annekatherin, for a Mother’s Day article in the German Sunday paper Bild Am Sonntag, she told me she hated it when her children, who were eight and ten, went by themselves to their grandmother’s house, a trip that took them four stops on the U-Bahn in Berlin. So why did she do it? Her reasoning was quite simple: “I want them to be independent and proud of what they can do,” she said. “If I’m always with them, they won’t be.”

  PSI has been studying children’s independent mobility since 1970 and can point to decades of research showing that children’s ability to move freely outside of the home without adult supervision is important for their healthy physical, social, emotional, and mental development. You don’t need to read the research pape
rs to understand the reasons: when children can only go outside with an adult attendant, they go outside less, and they don’t develop the physically healthy habit of walking places. They also have fewer opportunities to interact socially with friends. What might be less intuitive is that the presence of an adult can inhibit a child’s learning process.

  If an adult is constantly directing a child and watching over her every move, the child doesn’t learn as well as when she is exploring on her own, including developing the important skills of finding her way and moving safely through traffic. Rainer Becker, CEO of Deutsche Kinderhilfe, a German nonprofit that advocates for children’s rights and safety, frames this argument in terms of control versus responsibility: “How can a child learn self-reliance if at every moment he is under control and his parents always make decisions for him?” he said. “If we want to have adults who are self-reliant and responsible, they must learn how, but how can they learn if they have a childhood where they have learned control and nothing else?” It’s a pattern that self-perpetuates, Becker argues, as controlled children grow up to become controlling adults because that’s all they know.

  The challenge is to teach children to be aware of dangers without terrifying them. My friend Susan told me that when she had her first child, she happened to watch a documentary about pedophiles that scared her so much she cried for five days straight. But as time went on, she overcame her fear for her children’s sake. “I’m much calmer now but very much aware,” she said. “The more you think about it, the more it freaks you out. That doesn’t really help them, because your children get scared too and don’t know what to do when something happens.” Rather than chaperone her kids everywhere, Susan feels it’s much better to prepare them to handle potential dangers on their own. “The smartest thing to do is to let go a little bit—and make sure they go to karate class,” she said and laughed, but she was serious. Her two older daughters were both enrolled in karate classes.

  Helping children learn to stand up for themselves, even against their own parents, is critical, according to Becker. If parents are truly concerned about someone abusing their children, Becker said that one of the best things parents can do is to respect children’s right to say no, even to us.

  “Your child has her own will. If you want to touch your child, sometimes she likes it, sometimes not, so if your child doesn’t want to be touched by you, you have to respect that,” Becker said, adding that parents should never force a child to hug or kiss any relative if they don’t want to, even Grandma and Grandpa.

  It’s a matter of respect for children’s right to control their own bodies. It also helps protect them against people who would sexually abuse them, since most child abusers are not strangers, but people children already know, their neighbors and their relatives. (In the United States more than 92 percent of child sexual abusers are acquaintances or family members of their juvenile victims, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.) Becker argues that children who feel confident standing up to adults, no matter who they are, are more prepared to defend themselves against abuse.

  “A lot of people who are child abusers will stop if the child says no, because the typical child abuser is not the man behind the tree who will knock a child down, he is the man who wants a relationship with the child,” Becker said. Even in the more unlikely event of a stranger trying to convince a child to come with them, children who have been taught that they have a right to refuse adults are better prepared to resist than children who have been taught to always obey adults.

  Deutsche Kinderhilfe puts out a cartoon-illustrated guide for kids about walking to school. The guide recommends children eat a good breakfast, and gives traffic safety tips and advice on how to deal with strangers. Some of this text sounds familiar—such as never get into a stranger’s car no matter what the person promises, and if anyone tries to touch or grab you, shout “No! I don’t want to!” loudly.

  But here are a few pieces of advice Americans may not have heard: The guide suggests children have a password with their parents, so that if an adult, even one they know, ever says to come with them in an emergency, the children can ask that person for the password so that they know that their parents have agreed to trust this person. Also, if children ever feel that someone is following them or otherwise making them uncomfortable, they should seek help in a public place with a lot of people, such as a restaurant or a store. In other words, the guide advises asking strangers for help, instead of avoiding them.

  We heard this same idea from other German parents: that the majority of people would help a child in trouble. For instance, Zac’s colleague said he felt that sending his nine-year-old son traveling to and from school on the subway was relatively safe because there would be plenty of people on the train at that time of day, and if some crazy person tried to mess with his son, he expected the other travelers would interfere.

  In the meantime, my daughter was nearing her ninth birthday and campaigning to be allowed to do more things on her own. After discussing it with Zac, I started to relent. On some mornings, I walked her halfway up the street and then let her go the rest of the way to school herself. We also sent Sophia to the bakery downstairs in our building to buy rolls for us on Saturday mornings. The first time she went, I hung out over the balcony watching her take the few steps to the bakery on the corner. She showed up with the rolls and an extra muffin the bakery clerks had given her. After that, she went nearly every Saturday and Sunday morning for us, often coming back with an extra special treat. She told me the bakery clerks called her prinzesschen (“little princess”).

  Then Maya’s mother asked if her daughter could ring our bell some mornings, so the two girls could walk together the rest of the way to school. I agreed. They’d have each other, I reasoned, and in the mornings, there were all those other kids walking up the same street at the same time. Then came a day when Maya didn’t ring, and I finally let Sophia go all by herself.

  By the middle of third grade, Sophia was running most of her own mornings by herself: she would get up, get dressed, pack her bag and snack, and we’d say good-bye at our apartment door. She loved it, and as a parent, it was wonderful to see her so proud and taking responsibility for starting her day. Before I let her do this, it had been a battle of wills with me nagging and pushing her to get ready to go out the door together. I couldn’t help noticing that aside from my own worries, it was much easier for me, especially since I didn’t have to drag her little brother up the hill to school to drop her off, and then back down to the S-Bahn station for the ride to his kita.

  Judith also told me that convenience was the primary reason she let her oldest daughter ride the bus to school by herself. It made mornings less complicated in a family with two full-time working parents and two younger kids who were still in kita. Like me, Judith worried about “creepy people who abduct children,” but said that it was mostly the traffic that concerned her because that’s the most likely reason a child gets hurt. Still, aside from the convenience, she thought it was a good experience for her daughter.

  “If anything ever happened, of course, I’d feel so terribly guilty for not taking the time to go with her, but I think at some point they do have to learn it,” Judith said. “If they want to meet with friends or go to sports, they have to be flexible and be able to do it on their own.”

  I wasn’t quite as flexible. I still picked Sophia up after school at the end of the day. Hort, the after-school program, let children out at whatever time the parents indicated, so children were leaving school in ones and twos. There wasn’t the strength in numbers that there was in the mornings with a great group of kids traveling up the street together. The idea of Sophia walking home by herself, past the group of seedy-looking drinkers, who were usually out by that time, was too much for me. On the other hand, her friends did it all the time. They left school and walked themselves to an after-school activity, or to the park, or home.

  Freedom to Play

  One spring day, I agreed to
let Sophia go home with another friend, Katti, who lived nearby in an apartment across from Dragon Park. When I went to pick them up, I didn’t find them at Katti’s apartment. Instead, they were at the park, playing in the sand by themselves. Katti’s parents were nowhere in sight. By then I knew this was normal. I had seen plenty of school-age children at playgrounds without their parents. Still, it was unsettling for someone who comes from a culture where parents are arrested for leaving their children alone. In a 2015 Pew Research survey, 66 percent of American parents said children shouldn’t be allowed to be alone at a park until they were thirteen or older. Most (54 percent) also felt that a child shouldn’t even play in their front yard unsupervised until they were at least ten.

  Here again, the practices of German parents made me question my own parental instincts about safety. I started to consider the value of letting my child play outside without an adult present. I read articles by Peter Gray, a research psychologist at Boston College who has studied play in both animal and human development. As I mentioned earlier, Gray argues that there is a strong correlation between the decline of children’s free play and the rise in mental disorders among young people in America. When I contacted him to ask him more about the importance of play, he told me that he doesn’t really consider it “play” if an adult is present because the players, the children, have to be the ones in charge.