by Sara Zaske
I gaped at them. “She doesn’t sleep here on the weekends?”
“She tells us where she’s going to be. And I trust her,” he said. “It used to worry me a little more than Tine probably. Then Tine said we have to relax a little.”
Axel and Tine may not be typical middle-class German parents (if there is such a thing). They’re both artists—an actor and a fashion designer, respectively. Axel was raised in a small industrial town in West Germany. Tine grew up in East Berlin during the GDR days. But they have similar views on raising teenagers, espousing values that I’ve found fairly common among German parents: that teenagers should be able to manage a lot of their own lives, including their schoolwork and social lives.
As you might expect, in a country where eight-year-old children are free to roam their neighborhoods, German teens roam the city. Some even take vacations with only their peers as company. When I spoke to Axel and Tine, their daughter was in the midst of planning a camping trip with her friends—with no parents in attendance.
Like American parents, Germans know full well that unsupervised teenagers are likely to engage in risky behaviors. And they worry too. That’s at the root of the German saying kleine kinder, kleine sorgen; grosse kinder, grosse sorgen—essentially the bigger the child, the bigger the worries. Teenagers face many dangers as they try to become adults, and the consequences of making bad choices during this time—unwanted pregnancy, STDs, alcohol or drug addiction, academic failure—can have lasting impacts on the rest of their lives.
In the United States, parents typically respond to these threats by clamping down on adolescents, imposing strict rules and even laws in an attempt to dictate their behavior, but in Germany, they take almost the complete opposite approach. There are fewer prohibitions, legally and culturally, on what adolescents can do, and many German parents seem to feel that teenagers will behave more responsibly if they are given more freedom and a greater ability to control their own lives.
The Space to Be Young
Every day on the way to my son’s kita, we would walk through an odd little park. It was made out of a space between two buildings. The park didn’t have many structures: a few benches, some low cement blocks, a wooden platform off to one side that looked like a stage, and a couple of ping-pong tables. I thought it was a lame kids’ park until I realized it wasn’t intended for young children at all; it was for teenagers. Just down the street was a gymnasium (pronounced with a hard g), a public high school for university-bound students.
When gymnasium got out, I would often find a few teenagers at the park—trying out skateboard tricks on the cement blocks, playing ping-pong, or just hanging out on the wooden platform drinking a few beers.
This was in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, which has many desirable apartments, popular shops, and restaurants. I couldn’t imagine a space like this made on purpose for adolescents in a similar area in the United States. The neighbors would have shut it down; developers would have long ago filled that space with a tower of luxury condos.
One of the things I remember well about my own adolescence in the United States was how there never seemed to be any place for us to just be, outside of school or home. So we went to the mall even though we had nothing to buy. We hung out in parking lots and watched our friends illegally grind their skateboards onto curbs. We drove around in cars chasing rumors of house parties at homes where the parents were away. We snuck beers onto golf courses and hopped into pools after dark. It was alternately boring and risky, and when alcohol was involved, downright dangerous.
In Germany, teenagers have space to be themselves. In addition to park areas designed for them, adolescents can go into almost all places in Berlin, including dance clubs and bars. There are some rules, including a curfew: teens under sixteen must be out of the clubs and restaurants by ten p.m., those under eighteen must leave by midnight. Parents are supposed to help oversee that these rules are observed, but businesses that violate Germany’s youth protection laws can be hit with fines or even jail time.
At sixteen, teenagers can buy their own beer or wine, and traditionally in Germany, parents give older children their first glass of champagne or beer even earlier, around the age of fourteen. (When I was this age, my German American grandfather surprised me by pouring a small glass of beer for me at Thanksgiving dinner. I had no idea this was a German thing until now.)
Isabell, one of Zac’s graduate students, said that her mother always told her, “When you learn to drink at home you know your boundaries.” She had her first glass of champagne at Christmas when she was fourteen and claims that she has only “overdone it” four or five times in her life. “I always stopped before it got too bad,” she said. “I think if you forbid it until twenty-one it feels like something scary. So you do it because you’re a teenager, and you do things that are not allowed. If it’s allowed, it loses a lot of its—maybe magic is the wrong word—but then you do it for fun and with your friends. It’s not like you are just drinking until you fall over.”
Of course, some Germans do drink in excess. After all, this is the country that prides itself on its beer and has entire festivals dedicated to drinking the stuff in large quantities. Yet, while teenage binge drinking is a rising concern, the problem is at a lower level than it is in America. In a 2015 survey by the German health education agency (abbreviated BZgA in German), 12.9 percent of German youth ages twelve to seventeen reported getting drunk at least once a month. In comparison, 18 percent of American high school students reported they’d binge drank within the last month, according to a 2015 CDC survey. Even further, two studies published in the 2012 Lancet Series on Adolescent Health found that American teenagers have the worst problems among their peers in the Western world, not just with alcohol but also with drugs and violence. With such results, it doesn’t appear that our strict controls on teenage behavior result in the best outcomes.
Perhaps we should look at the benefits of the German model, where the culture and the law give children more freedom and rights at the age of fourteen. This age is a huge milestone for Germans: it’s the point when kids are no longer considered children but teenagers, not quite full adults but on their way. Typically there’s a public and private celebration marking this turning point. In religious families, fourteen is usually when young people have a religious confirmation. In the East, many people still hold a secular jugendfeier, or “youth party,” for their fourteen-year-olds, a tradition that started during the GDR days as a substitute for confirmation. It fell out of favor when the Wall fell, but it has been making a comeback, and I saw plenty of jugendfeier invitations alongside religious confirmation cards in the shops in Berlin.
Turning fourteen also means more responsibility too. Under German law, fourteen-year-olds can be held criminally responsible for their actions (whereas children under that age can never be tried as adults, as they sometimes are in the United States). Fourteen is the age of “spiritual maturity,” and young people can decide for themselves whether to take religion classes or not. It’s also the age of consent, meaning at fourteen they can legally have sex—as long as their partners are also fourteen years or older, and there’s no coercion involved.
This may be shocking to Americans, since the age of consent in most states is sixteen or higher, but Germany is famously liberal about sex and sees little wrong with young people having sex as long as they are safe about it. Some German parents will even let their teenager’s boyfriend or girlfriend spend the night. In a parenting article on T-Online, Germany’s most popular online portal, Simone Blass advises parents on how to respond to having “a stranger in the bathroom” when their son or daughter has an overnight guest. Allowing such sleepovers, Blass contends, is ultimately safer for young people since it removes the need for secrecy and for rebellion. She points out that parental restrictions can have the opposite effect: “Parents often forbid their children to do certain things—rules that will most likely be ignored anyway. In the worst case scenario, they will drive
young people to do things out of spite that they otherwise would have held off on.”
Many parents fear that this kind of openness will encourage teens to engage in sexual activity earlier, but there is little evidence to support that. A 2015 study by the BZgA showed that only 6 percent of German fourteen-year-olds had engaged in sexual activity. On the other hand, more than half of young Germans had their first sexual experience by age seventeen, which is about the same percentage of sexually active seventeen-year-olds in the United States. More than half of German young people also said they speak openly with their parents about sexuality and contraception.
I’ve always told my children they can talk to me about anything, and I plan to be honest and nonjudgmental when it comes to questions of sex and relationships—but I can’t say I’m comfortable with the idea of having a boyfriend or girlfriend sleep over. I think few parents are—even the liberal Germans, but they are still more reluctant to be strict and squelch their children’s freedom.
“Often parents don’t agree about the boyfriend staying overnight in the home, but the children usually win,” said psychologist Heidi Keller, who pointed out that since teenage children are free to do many things on their own, they expect their independence in this area as well. “One of my friends was very embarrassed that a strange young man was having breakfast with them, but eventually he became a full member of the family.”
To allow our teens this freedom in American society, which is so heavily laden with moral judgments about sex, seems nearly impossible. On the other hand, I can see that the American taboo on teen sex hasn’t been working out very well: as I noted earlier, American teens have much higher rates of unwanted pregnancies, abortion, and HIV than Germans do. I want my kids to be safe and make good decisions for themselves—not to rush into having sex as an act of rebellion against their parents. Their safety is more important to me than pushing my version of sexual morality on them.
As parents, we might have to admit to ourselves, despite laws and all the parental threats in the world, most American teens are drinking and having sex well before they leave our homes. They are also going to places where no adults are on hand to supervise them. We can try and stop them, but most likely our efforts will just drive teenagers to do these things in secret. Even if we succeed in controlling their movement, we aren’t preparing them well for making decisions on their own. After all, there’s not a huge difference between a seventeen-year-old at home and an eighteen-year-old on their own.
My friend Aimee lives in a college town in the United States and sees firsthand what happens when those young people are released into full freedom after years of being restrained by their parents. “It feels like the students are just starting to test out independence—but at eighteen! And then in big ways, with big consequences, in a society of equally irrational age-mates where no one is asking for trust in response,” she said. “I honestly think the German system feels safer for kids to learn how to test boundaries.”
Aimee isn’t comfortable with everything she sees children doing in Germany—the free-for-all of the playgrounds, the dangerous things like sharp knives and fireworks that kids are allowed to use—but ultimately she felt the Germans better prepared young people to be on their own. “If they’re more used to responsibility at a younger age, and getting larger pieces of it as they go, then when they finally have a solid grasp of it as college students, they might make better choices,” she said.
An Extra-Long Adolescence
To learn more about Germany’s youth, I met with the noted social scientist Klaus Hurrelmann at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Hurrelmann has studied and written extensively on adolescence and has helped put together several Shell Youth Studies, a huge survey of Germany’s young people that comes out every three to four years.
Hurrelmann told me that German history with its “tides of authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism” in the past century affected how children were raised, and up until about ten years ago, the remainders of these two extremes could still be felt. “Only recently are things moving to a more normal and relaxed style of children’s education,” he said. “I think all of this has not happened in the United States.”
I had to agree, as the pattern of parenting in America has seemed to be a slow and steady march toward more supervision and control. While not exactly authoritarian, there certainly isn’t anything very “relaxed” about how Americans parent today.
Raising teenagers has become even more complicated since adolescence has become a lot longer than it used to be—no matter which side of the Atlantic you are on. According to Hurrelmann, in the 1800s, puberty typically started around seventeen, now it begins at twelve (and according to some estimates even earlier than that). That’s at least an additional five years on the front end, and more years have been added to the other side. Hurrelmann claimed the average adolescence is now fifteen years, extending well into the twenties.
How we mark the end of adolescence has also become less clear. In the past, adulthood meant moving out of your parents’ house, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having kids. Many adults today don’t do some of these things at any point in their lives.
“This is the difficult job of educating, of parenting, teenage children living in your house on their way to becoming adults in a situation where nobody knows what adulthood really is any longer,” Hurrelmann said.
So young people in Germany have a lot in common with their peers in America. They are all growing up at a time when it is less clear what being a grown-up means. More German and American young people are staying at home with their parents long after the age of eighteen. In the United States, the rate climbed to 32.1 percent for adults ages eighteen to thirty-four in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. In Germany, however, it’s even higher, with 43.1 percent of young adults in the same age group living at home with their parents in 2015, according to an EU survey.
Yet adult children living at home is not a new trend in Germany, since it’s more culturally accepted for young people to live with their parents. That doesn’t mean they are completely dependent. As Slate columnist Rebecca Schuman pointed out, it’s not the fact that a grown child is living at home that matters, it is how they are living at home. Schuman notes that German young adults usually act more like roommates with their parents: they do their own shopping and laundry, come and go as they please, and help pay the rent.
In fact, German young people, living at home or not, are much more likely to be employed than their American peers. Germany has one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the world. Only 9.3 percent of Germans ages twenty to twenty-four were not in employment, education, or training in 2015, according to the OECD. In the United States, it was 15.8 percent for the same age group.
Hurrelmann argues that achieving independence means learning to run your own life and having the “capacity to be your own self-manager and to organize your life by yourself.” This is the difficulty we have as parents: to teach our children how to manage their time, their activities, and schooling for themselves, to help them figure out what they want and how to get it, but without telling them directly how to do it or, worse, doing it for them. “All this has to be done by the children themselves,” Hurrelmann said.
The Academic Question
Zac and I weren’t even close to having to deal with these teenage problems, but both Ozzie and Sophia were still coming up on a few critical turning points. Ozzie was now five and in his last year of kita, eagerly awaiting his own einschulung celebration to mark the start of school. That winter we filled out the forms for him to enter first grade at the same school Sophia attended. Sophia herself would be moving on to fourth grade, out of the comfort of the mixed-grade class of younger kids into a more academically challenging year, and looming ever closer to the time when it would be decided whether she was university material.
Despite the relaxed approach in the early grades, the academic stakes get very high by t
he end of German primary school. Traditionally, students are set onto academic tracks by fifth grade. This means that at the tender age of ten, many German students are placed on one of three paths: children who are clearly university-bound go to gymnasium; students who don’t perform quite as well are placed on a middle track and go to realschule, which can still lead to university or a shorter technical college program; and a third track, the hauptschule, emphasizes vocational education. All three tracks are meant to lead to viable careers, and this strategy has worked well for Germany’s economy in the past.
Today, some see this system as antiquated, and naturally, not every parent is a big fan. “It’s kind of a traumatic approach to what life has to offer and say, ‘Look you are ten years old, and we have to decide if you are going to be an academic,’ ” Axel said. “I don’t like that at all. Coming from a family of teachers, we’ve always discussed this separation. We all know where it’s coming from and what it’s based on, but I don’t think it’s appropriate anymore as a society.”
Yet the system is so entrenched in German culture, it’s a hard thing to fight. Axel and Tine’s daughter is in gymnasium, and most upper- and middle-class parents want to be sure their children are on that top track so that they will have the best opportunities available to them. And going to gymnasium by itself is no guarantee. To be accepted at a university, graduating high school students have to pass a series of tough exit exams called the arbitur. Many students take three or four of these exams, in different subjects, and each one can be four to five hours long—sort of like taking the SAT, but longer, and repeated three times, in more subjects than just math and writing, such as the sciences, history, and languages.
Even though the stakes are high, many German parents fight the impulse to monitor their children’s study habits. Annette Turowski, an educator and parent who lives outside of Düsseldorf, said she used to hover over her son’s schooling like a helikopter-eltern (“helicopter parent”) until she went on a trip to Sweden and visited some schools there. “Sweden had a completely different approach to the education of children: any child who wants to learn needs to have interior motivation,” she said. When she came back, Annette told her oldest son, who was twelve at the time, that she would no longer interfere: he was in charge of his own schooling. “He turned out fine,” she said. “Maybe his marks could have been better, but the other possibility was that he could have left home at sixteen and ended up in some gutter.”
