Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  None of my children’s German friends had these problems. They usually fell right into playing from the moment they came over to the moment they left. American kids obviously didn’t play the same way. Some didn’t understand my children’s games, which were primarily based on pretending to be things and acting out stories. “Do you want to play pretend animals?” Sophia shyly asked one girl. She looked at Sophia like she was nuts.

  “Can we watch music videos?” she countered. Almost all the children who came over to play would do that at some point: ask for media, for video games, TV, music videos, or movies. I wished I could take them all and give them enough outside unstructured playtime until they figured out how to play again.

  It wasn’t all like this. Sophia and Ozzie both found friends who enjoyed playing like they did, at least some of the time, and there were plenty of kids who were interested in building forts in the backyard and trying out our zip line. I also heard other parents say they would like to give their children more freedom. One father commented on the fact that Ozzie and I rode our bikes every day. “When I was young, my parents would just point to our bikes and say, ‘Better get going!’ ” he laughed. “And off we went!”

  “You know you could probably let your kids do that now,” I said. “It’s a safe neighborhood, not a lot of traffic.”

  “Not in today’s world,” he said, and I thought he was going to warn me how there were so many dangerous child predators nowadays. Instead, he told me how his young boys like to go to the corner of the street in the morning to wave good-bye to their mom when she left for work, but people in passing cars would slow down to make sure the boys were being supervised.

  My neighbor Melissa also told me that she sometimes sends her boys to the park down the street by themselves, but that other parents asked her, “How can you do that?”

  Still, I was encouraged by a recent neighborhood gathering, where I met several parents who expressed a desire to get more kids out together at the park more often—usually with some parents present, but it’s a start.

  Like Melissa, we try to let our kids play in the park by themselves whenever there’s a good opportunity. If a few more parents did the same, it would become normal, and the park would be more fun and safe for all of the kids. It just takes a tip in the right direction.

  Lenore Skenazy, the founder of the free-range kids movement, says that all a parent has to do is to try it once. “You have to steel yourself to let your kid do one thing on their own, particularly if it’s something you loved doing as a kid, like ride your bike to the library or walk to school,” she said. That experience can be transformative—for the parent as well as the child. It’s wonderful to see your child learn to do something independently for the first time. “The joy that you feel is hardwired,” Skenazy said. “Just like the fear, the joy of seeing your kid grow up, succeed, blossom, mature, will surprise you. Those things are extremely powerful, and they break the grip of fear.”

  I already knew this joy. Before we left Germany, we had already let Sophia do a number of things by herself, from walking to school and playing in the park to buying bread at the bakery for the family.

  Here in America, I let her do things by herself as much as possible. I am still beset by irrational fears of someone kidnapping her off the street, and the slightly more realistic fears that she will get lost or be hit by a car. But I’ve come to realize my fears have more to do with me, and the parenting culture around me, than what is best for her. She needs to learn how to navigate her world. So when she asks to do something by herself, I try to assess the real risk and her ability to handle it—and more often than not, I let her do it.

  I’ve also seen that the simple act of letting my child have this freedom has encouraged others. Sophia’s friends have a sudden new interest in riding their bikes more, and when school started up again this last fall, there was a whole new pack of kids in our neighborhood riding bikes by themselves to school. I can’t say Sophia was the inspiration, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt to see her flying by their houses every morning and afternoon. I like to think that as more people see this group of kids do it, it will expand and expand until it’s the norm and not the exception. While protest, activism, and writing articles and books can have an influence, cultural change often happens just by the actions of a few people emboldening others.

  Of course, the freedom also caught on within our household. I had just gotten used to Sophia riding through the streets of our neighborhood by herself when Ozzie asked to walk home from school alone. He’s six—too young! I thought instantly. Yet here he was asking me, telling me he was ready to try it.

  We were standing on a side street near the school where many parents parked their cars. I had to push aside the nagging worry of what the other parents would think. It’s all relative, I reminded myself. If we were in Berlin, the other parents wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the sight of even a six-year-old walking alone. Since it was near the end of first grade, most of the German parents would be preparing their kids to get to school by themselves for the next year.

  It was late spring and we’d gone this route at least a hundred times together on foot and by bike. I had only driven that day because I’d had a work appointment. It was a hot day, and Ozzie didn’t want to get into the hot car, and Sophia didn’t want to walk with him.

  “OK, if you think you’re ready.…” I said.

  “I’ll run!” Ozzie said excitedly. “I bet I’ll be home before you are.” This was a distinct possibility because we lived so close, and he could cut through the open park on his way, while we had to go around with the car.

  “But don’t run when you cross a street, right? You’ll be extra careful crossing the streets?”

  “Yes, I’ll be super careful.”

  “OK, but listen,” I said and leaned down near him for one last warning. “Most Americans aren’t used to seeing little kids walking by themselves so they might say something to you. Don’t let them bother you. Tell them you are walking home from school, and your mother knows where you are.”

  Ozzie nodded, the picture of seriousness.

  And off he went. He got to the first corner, and I could already see one of the other cars slowing down by him to make sure he was all right. I got in our car with Sophia and drove slowly down the street, watching him in my rearview mirror.

  “He’s fine, Mom, go!” said Sophia impatiently.

  I went. We arrived home before him, but he showed up a few minutes later very sweaty. He had indeed run most of the way home.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Michael’s mom asked me if I wanted a ride, but I said no,” he told me with pride. I’ve told my children many times never to get in anyone’s car without checking with me first, so at least this was reassuring that he knew enough to refuse—and that he stuck to his plan.

  Later, that mother asked me if Ozzie was all right. She’d seen him running on the street and said he looked scared. I told her he was fine, but now I was worried again. Maybe it was too early to try? Was he terrified?

  He didn’t say anything about walking home again for a while. Then a couple weeks later, he asked to walk home again. I let him. When he arrived this time, he announced, “I wasn’t even scared this time!”

  “You were scared before?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I was a little scared at first when I was all by myself, but then I saw that nothing bad was going to happen. This time it was easy.”

  Boom. There was the joy. My six-year-old had just reminded me what learning selbständigkeit, real independence, was all about. It wasn’t about my child never being afraid when trying a new thing. It was about feeling that fear and doing it anyway. Ozzie hadn’t just walked home by himself. He’d faced a personal challenge and conquered it. He’d taken a major step toward growing up.

  EPILOGUE

  German Lessons

  From the moment my first child was born, I wondered who she would become, what kind of person she would be. I al
so felt this awesome responsibility. I couldn’t believe someone had let us out of the hospital with this tiny creature who only knew how to eat, sleep, poop, and scream if any of those things didn’t happen in the right way—and somehow we were supposed to teach her how to become a real human being. I was so afraid I would screw her up royally.

  I overestimated my influence. If there is any relief to be found in these pages, it should be that we, as parents, are not in control of our children’s lives. Sure, there are things we can do that will hurt them, but if we’ve got the basics down—love, food, shelter, and some general guidance—that’s all that’s required. Our children will do the rest of the growing up all by themselves.

  The biggest lesson I learned in Germany is that my children are not really mine. They belong first and foremost to themselves. I already knew this intellectually, but when I saw parents in Germany put this value into practice, I saw how differently I was acting. I often treated my children, even as they grew older and more capable, as beings who needed to be constantly supervised—and, in effect, controlled. I lectured and pushed them until they would behave the way I wanted them to, so that they would do what I wanted them to. I yelled “Achtung!” way too often.

  Once I started to treat my children as individuals, growing and coming into their own, it changed the way I viewed my role as a mother. I’m still a source of love and support, but rather than being an “authority”—an enforcer of all rules and teacher of all things—now I try to act as more of a guide and a helper. I also try to make space for the many other people they can learn from: other family members, child-care givers, school teachers, friends, and neighbors.

  I’ve been actively trying to step back more and more as they get older, even though this requires pushing back against my culture that still assumes that I, as their mother, should be the “primary caregiver.” This is a particularly hard thing to do as a woman. Motherhood has been both a source of power and a prison for us: in the past, the home was where women ruled, and slaved, and where we were given the great responsibility of bringing up children. Feminist activism has expanded women’s rights and our role in the workforce, but it hasn’t changed our roles as mothers all that much.

  While many mothers wish for more equity in parenting, it’s tough to let go of the power that role also gives us. Many men will acquiesce nearly all parenting decisions and care to their wives. Indeed, some American fathers are working such long hours, they are barely present in their families’ lives, except on weekends. I know a lot of men who strive to have a greater role in their children’s lives, and things are changing slowly.

  If we want to make things better for our children, we need to start making things better for ourselves, for parents. We need to push for better policies: universal preschool, subsidized child care, school policies that allow more play in school and don’t allow school work to creep into family time. Even more than that, we need to push our politicians and employers for benefits that Germans, and frankly the rest of the developed world, take as rights: paid parental leave, work hours that don’t extend into evenings and weekends, and a guaranteed amount of sick and vacation days. We simply need more time to be families.

  This is not just for parents now, but for our children, so that we can create a better world for them when they grow up. I think a good piece of our anxiety around academic achievement is that having a middle-class income isn’t enough to make it in the United States anymore. We fear that if our children aren’t extremely successful, they won’t enjoy a good quality of life and will have to struggle their entire lives. Americans now work more hours than any of our peers in the Western world. Our Puritan work ethic and capitalist value of competition has gotten so out of hand that work has subsumed almost everything else.

  I remember sitting in a café meeting with a potential client, a young woman from South Africa who worked at a large international start-up based in Berlin. She told me she had lived in the States but didn’t like it at all. I was taken aback. Not like America? I’d just assumed that the United States would be the number-one destination for any immigrant around the world, especially young people. “Why not?” I asked her.

  “I couldn’t stand that whole ‘work is life’ thing. You are defined by what you do for a job,” she said. “You work evenings, weekends. There’s so little vacation.”

  At home in the United States, benefits like a guaranteed four weeks of vacation sound virtually impossible to achieve, but when you go abroad and talk to people from other countries, you realize it is possible. In fact they see such breaks from work as normal, even necessary to enjoying life. Sure, it will take a sustained political and social effort to make it happen, but the first step is a simple shift in values: to place something other than a job at the center of our assessment of what makes a good life.

  If we can remove the heavy weight of the “work is life” value, it will remove a lot of the pressure in our parenting. We can let our children grow and learn what they are interested in—a surer path to a fulfilling life than one focused on just learning what will fit the career path we’ve picked for them.

  But an even bigger step would be to reduce our parental power in general—to give over the main control of raising children to the people it belongs to the most: our children themselves.

  The Rights of Children

  Researchers in child development tend to lump parents in Western societies together as valuing “independence” in raising their children, as opposed to other cultures, often in the developing world, which place a higher value on interrelatedness—meaning children’s obedience to their elders and connectedness to their community are more important than their autonomy. Parents in many of those cultures don’t rely on parenting books. As the German cultural psychologist Bettina Lamm pointed out to me, adults in these places often learn parenting skills from their own parents and grandparents. This doesn’t happen as much in Western cultures anymore. We tend to break from previous generations. (Take a moment, and think what happens when your mother or your mother-in-law tells you how to raise your kids.) Instead, parents try to learn from books and peers.

  And I think we can learn something from our peers in Germany. As I’ve said earlier, German culture is not monolithic. The psychologist Heidi Keller would probably argue with many of the assumptions I’ve made about German parenting culture (politely, of course—she is a lovely person to talk to). She co-wrote a chapter with Hiltrud Otto titled “Is There Such a Thing as German Parenting?” in which they point out, among other things, that so many influences are affecting German parents that it’s hard to pick out one approach to raising children that is distinctly German.

  The United States is no doubt one of these influences. Our culture sits heavily on cultures all over the world, and its presence is obvious in Germany. Our movies, music, and even our consumer culture are everywhere. I once asked my language partner, Kordula, why so many Berlin stores had English names: “Because it’s the language of America, and America is the land of shopping!” she said.

  Our overparenting trend has also made inroads into German culture as well, and helikopter-eltern can be found there too. They are not prevalent in Berlin, and Rainer Becker of Kinderhilfe insists such parents are in the minority in Germany. My friend Taska recently sent me an article from Der Spiegel decrying the rise of helicopter parenting. The article tells parents to give responsibility back to their children, to let them play on their own, to get them outside and away from computers, and to stop overscheduling them with team activities and organized playdates. It reads like a free-range parenting article you might find on an American blog, only with one significant difference: the author is not a parenting activist but a teacher. He’s part of the official, mainstream world that governs the education of children, and that official world is strongly in favor of raising children with self-reliance and independence. There is no surrounding culture of control in Germany.

  As I researched this book, I realized that a lot of the diff
erences I’d noticed in Germany around raising children had to do with the fact that Germans believe children have rights—or more precisely, Germans believe children have more rights than Americans are willing to give their children. The rights of children are encoded into German law and in the everyday actions of ordinary people.

  I’ve met many German parents who expressed the same anxieties Americans have over how best to raise their kids and keep them safe. Whenever I told them about how brave I thought German parents were to let their children go around unsupervised, I was met with surprise.

  “Really?” said one mother I’d met at kita. “I thought we watched our children too carefully!”

  Annekatherin, the mother who let her two children take the subway to their grandmother’s house, used strong language to describe how she felt about them doing so: “I hate it,” she said. Yet she let her kids do it anyway because she felt her children had the right to learn how to move about in their world.

  In America, we’ve let our worries over kids’ safety and future eclipse our children’s most fundamental rights. The United States is the only country in the world that has not ratified the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The opposition to the CRC has come primarily from “parents’ rights” groups. Never mind that ratifying the CRC will do nothing to change U.S. law—it’s an aspirational document, and countries with much more restrictive cultures, such as Saudi Arabia and China, have ratified it—look at the central objection these parent groups have against the CRC: they feel that giving children rights would deprive them of their own power as parents over their children.

  These groups name specific rights they find alarming such as a child’s right to express their own religious beliefs and the right for children to have leisure (which I guess means they want to make sure their children are working all the time, whether in school or out). The parents’ rights groups also worry that the CRC’s statements about “the right of the child to protection from corporal punishment and other cruel or degrading forms of punishment” means they cannot spank their children.