INTRODUCTION
Modern Germany
Few people smile on the trains in Berlin. By some unwritten rule, everyone sits silent and straight-faced on the S-Bahns and U-Bahns that run above and below the city. If you see people who are smiling, chances are they’re tourists. If they’re talking and laughing loudly, chances are they’re American.
One gray day in Berlin, my daughter, Sophia, and I were talking and laughing loudly on an S-Bahn full of quiet German passengers. Sophia was two and a half and super chatty. We had recently arrived in Berlin, and everything was new to her. I wasn’t about to shush her as she commented on the things passing by her window: the trees, the stations, another train, the cars on the road. She saw a bus, which was her cue to launch into her favorite song, “Wheels on the Bus,” at top volume. The wheels really go round in Sophia’s version. I glanced at the old woman across from us, trying to remember the proper way to phrase an apology, when the most amazing thing happened: she smiled.
Finally, I thought, someone appreciates how adorable my daughter is. Then, the woman opened her purse and pulled out a small piece of candy. She didn’t even look at me. She handed it directly to Sophia.
I panicked. I hadn’t yet taught Sophia not to trust strangers with candy! In America, people just don’t offer candy to children. I battled conflicting impulses: grab Sophia and storm off? Or be polite to the first stranger who had made a friendly gesture?
Sophia turned and held the candy up to me, a huge smile on her face. I let politeness, and logic, prevail: this German grandmother was clearly not trying to kidnap my child, and there was no chance a razor blade could fit in a piece of candy that small. I took it from Sophia, unwrapped it, tried not to be too obvious about examining it, and handed it back to my daughter. She popped it into her mouth—and, amazingly, didn’t die.
This experience taught me two things: first, Berliners didn’t know about “stranger danger,” and second, my assumption that Germans were unsmiling, unfriendly people who were harsh with children might not be entirely true.
As I would learn over the next six and a half years in Berlin, much of what I thought I knew about Germans was wrong—especially the way they approach raising children. The parents I met were almost the polar opposite of the stereotype of the overbearing, strict German parent. In fact, compared to today’s American parents who constantly supervise their children, they were positively relaxed.
When my daughter turned three, we invited a family we had met in our neighborhood to a picnic at a local park. It was a sunny spring day, and the park was beautiful with long stretches of green lawn bordered by tall trees. We chose a spot close to an enclosed playground, which had a tall stone wall in front of it. Shortly after arriving, our friends’ two children asked if they could go to the playground.
“Sure,” their mother said.
“Can I go too?” Sophia asked. I agreed, and all three of them went running off, two three-year-old girls and a five-year-old boy. They disappeared behind the wall, out of sight. No one else moved. Their mother started arranging plates on the picnic blanket. Her husband was talking with mine as he set up the barbecue. Feeling like I was missing something, I got up. “Um … I’ll go,” I said.
“Oh!” the other mother said. “They’ll be fine. They play here all the time.”
“It’s just that—Sophia might need help,” I said and followed the kids.
I remember thinking how strange it was that this couple didn’t watch their children on the playground. Then I noticed all the other unsupervised kids running around the park. Some parents were watching over babies and toddlers, but most of the adults were at picnic tables or sitting on blankets talking with each other while their children came and went.
This was normal behavior in Berlin. Parents didn’t hover over their children on playgrounds, many of which feature large structures like giant wooden boats and towering pyramids made of rope and metal—way more dangerous than the typical American playground of plastic and padded foam. In Berlin, school-age kids also walk to school, parks, and stores alone, or with only their peers as company. Adults rarely interfere in their children’s play, not even their fights, preferring to let them work it out themselves.
It’s part of the cultural value of selbständigkeit, or self-reliance. In America, we might call this “free range” parenting, but in Germany, it’s normal parenting. German parents believe that independence is good for children, that handling risk is a necessary part of growing up. This means they trust their children with more tasks as they grow older and supervise them less. Children are also assumed to be capable of making some decisions for themselves even at a young age, including whether or not to take a piece of candy from a nice lady on a train.
Beyond the Stereotype
Whenever I tell my American friends and family about how much freedom German parents give their children, they react with surprise and disbelief. I usually end up reminding them how long it has been since the end of World War II. Because it is true that German parents were strict and authoritarian—in the 1940s. They have changed quite a bit since then.
Many Americans’ idea of Germany is still fixed at World War II. The conflict has become somewhat of an obsession in the United States, judging by the sheer volume of books and movies we’ve produced around the war and the Holocaust. Some historians have even argued that there has been an “Americanization” of German history, which oversimplifies the Nazi years and culturally appropriates the Holocaust. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote in 1999 about this tendency, recounting how American tourists were disappointed to find out there weren’t gas chambers at the Buchenwald concentration camp. “Before, people did not want to see the truth,” said Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald memorial. “Now they want to see what they expect to see, and we have to disappoint them and show how rich and complicated history is.”
Another persistent, oversimplified American idea is that our country was the lone rescuing hero of Europe during World War II, even though historical facts don’t support this interpretation. We conveniently forget that it was the Soviet Army, not American forces, that took Berlin and forced Hitler from power. According to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, more than 8.8 million Soviet soldiers lost their lives fighting in World War II, a number that dwarfs American and British military casualties, which numbered closer to 400,000 each. This fact should not diminish the sacrifice of our soldiers; rather, we should expand our concept of victory to include the significant contributions of our allies at the time.
Blame it on poor history education, exaggerated patriotism, or inaccurate Hollywood movies, but some Americans can’t be swayed from this heroic vision even when presented with evidence to the contrary. A friend of mine who works as a tour guide in Berlin told me that the American tourists she takes to World War II monuments and museums remain convinced that it was the United States that won the war. British and Russian tourists, of course, have other opinions.
America as the hero of World War II is so entrenched in our culture that perhaps it is hard to let the other side of that equation, the enemy, Nazi Germany, become a thing of the past. To change our idea of modern Germans, we might also have to change our idea of ourselves.
A Short Historical Update
Most Germans alive today were not born by the time World War II ended. That’s not to say they haven’t been affected by it—quite the opposite. Learning about the country’s role in the war and the Holocaust is part of every German’s education. As a result, the culture at large has undergone a major transformation, which was highlighted by the German response to the recent refugee crisis in Europe.
In 2015, while other European countries tried to block the influx of immigrants fleeing conflicts in places such as Syria and Iraq, Germany welcomed them. Average citizens came out in droves to greet the incoming refugees at train stations. They donated money, food, and clothing—so much that police in Munich had to ask them to stop. Some people even opened their homes to refugee families.
At the start of the crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that any Syrian entering the country would be granted asylum. “Germany is a strong country,” she said in August 2015. “We have already accomplished so much. We can do it!”
That year Germany took in nearly 1 million refugees alone, more than 1 percent of the country’s population of 82 million. To compare, if the United States with its population of roughly 319 million had done the same, we would have taken in more than 3 million refugees. Instead President Obama offered to raise the limit of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States to 10,000, and even that amount was met with opposition.
The newly elected President Trump went even further and tried to stop all incoming refugees by implementing a contested immigration ban his first week in office.
In Germany, assimilating such a large refugee group has not gone smoothly, and the influx stoked fears of terrorism and helped fuel the rise of an anti-immigrant political party, the AfD (Alternative for Germany). However, the initial German response to the refugee crisis was remarkable and, many thought, uncharacteristic. Germany has also so far resisted the wave of right-wing populism that caused the United Kingdom to exit the European Union and propelled Donald Trump into power in the United States. Some have even called Germany the last defender of liberal democracy and its chancellor the new leader of the free world—in a stunning twist of history. Yet Germany’s relative openness to refugees and resistance to right-wing demagoguery shouldn’t be all that surprising—if we had paid much attention to the changes in German culture post–World War II.
At the end of the war, an estimated 14 million Germans were refugees themselves. Many were expelled from eastern parts of Europe or fled the advance of the Soviet army. Postwar Germany was divided up and occupied by foreign powers, one of which didn’t leave for more than forty years. East Germans continued to flee to the West long after the war had ended: an estimated 1.65 million had left the East by the time the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. All this means that a sizable portion of modern Germans remember being refugees themselves or heard about the experience from older friends and relatives.
The “economic miracle” that followed World War II in the 1950s rebuilt the West German economy and the country’s optimism, shaped in no small part by America’s financial and political influence. Historian Hagen Schulze notes that in 1957, the Christian Democrat Party (the forerunner of the CDU party that Merkel now leads) successfully campaigned with a slogan that meant “Affluence for everybody,” based on a belief that anyone who worked hard should be able to succeed—a sentiment that should sound familiar to American ears. This period also marked the beginning of the “de-Nazification” of Germany, an effort that was not considered completely successful by many of the generation that followed. The new government also established an agency for civic education, now called the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (BPB), which is specifically designed to “educate the German people about democratic principles and prevent any moves to re-establish a totalitarian regime.”
The youth movement of the 1960s sought to make a more dramatic break with the Nazi past. Like their peers in the United States, West German students took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War, but their rebellion against their parents’ generation went even further. The German youth saw their elders as responsible for the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. They rejected almost everything their parents represented: their authority, their government, and their values, including how they raised their children.
In the meantime, East Germans were dealing with an oppressive Soviet-controlled government that spied on its own people, restricted their movements, and limited their choices. The power plays between the United States and Soviet Union ultimately freed East Germany, but as Schulze points out, it was the East Germans themselves whose protests in 1989 tipped the balance and brought down the Berlin Wall. While Germany has been reunified for more than twenty-five years, many of today’s influential modern Germans grew up in the East, including Chancellor Merkel, and they took the lessons from that time to heart.
All these political and cultural events have affected how Germans raise their children.
The youth protest movement of the 1960s brought anti-authoritarian ideas to child care. In Frankfurt, Monika Seifert started kinderläden, day care centers, which emphasized “repression-free” education, a philosophy that deliberately set itself against the old “German virtues of obedience, diligence, modesty, and cleanliness.” Seifert’s anti-authoritarian theory basically held that children should rule themselves—or run wild, depending on your perspective.
The anti-authoritarian kinderläden movement had its share of critics, and today, the parenting norm has moved more to the middle. Regardless, super strict, authoritarian parenting is widely rejected in today’s Germany. For example, in 2000, Germany outlawed corporal punishment of children entirely: spanking a child is considered a crime, whether in school or at home. In the United States, the practice is still allowed at home in all fifty states, and nineteen still allow corporal punishment in schools.
In Germany, the legal and cultural shift has made corporal punishment all but a thing of the past. In a 2009 Allensbach Institute poll, only 7 percent of young Germans, ages sixteen to twenty-nine, reported being spanked by their parents. In contrast, a 2013 Harris Poll found that 87 percent of Americans were spanked as children, and 67 percent of current parents said they have spanked their own children—even though extensive research shows that corporal punishment not only doesn’t work to get children to comply with their parents’ rules but is also linked to a range of long-term problems, including increased aggression, anti-social behavior, and mental-health and cognitive problems. This is according to an analysis of fifty years of research on the subject, which experts from the University of Texas and the University of Michigan published in the Journal of Family Psychology in 2016. So despite the lingering “strict” stereotype, today’s German parents take a gentler approach to raising their children than their American peers do.
The current German approach to parenting is by no means uniform, and it is complicated by regional differences, especially between the East and West. While under communist rule, East German educators and parents emphasized the values of relatedness, group conformity, and responsibility to their community, as opposed to parents in the West who prized developing children’s autonomy, according to a comparison study of child-rearing goals published in the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth in 2012.
Germany’s reunification in 1989 brought the values of the whole country closer to the West’s model, but many attitudes from the East still persist, creating a culture that stresses both independence and responsibility to others. Nowhere was this parenting mix more apparent than in the once-divided city of Berlin, and my little family unwittingly landed right in the heart of it.
I knew precious little about German history before we arrived in Berlin. I mistakenly thought that this country, as part of the developed Western world, would have a similar parenting culture to my own. To be honest, I didn’t have much self-awareness of my own cultural norms when it comes to being a parent.
Like many modern American mothers, I was constantly searching for that elusive balance between work and family. I wanted to have children but hoped to continue a writing career. I had also internalized the impossible cultural expectations of the ideal, self-sacrificing mom who places her children above all else.
I wanted to raise my children to be strong, independent, free individuals—all very American values. Yet I tended to use paradoxical parenting practices: constantly correcting my children, overemphasizing their academic achievement, and closely supervising them to ensure their safety. Moving to Germany made me realize how American these practices were—and how misguided.
I remember a moment when I was running through the streets of Berlin, chasing after my two kids, who were both on bikes and going much too fast for my liking. I shouted at them. “Achtung, kids!” Which I intended to mean “Be careful!” My children eventually stopped, looking more worried about my reaction than what they had been doing. As I struggled to catch my breath and detail my rules around bikes and speed, I realized how awfully hard I was trying to control them. I had rarely heard a German parent or teacher shout “Achtung” at children, a term usually reserved for strong danger. They have greater trust in their children’s ability to look out for themselves. In the face of this difference, I started to question my need for constant vigilance. What was I so worried about? Why was I so anxious when they were not?
The Culture of Control
I had always considered myself a relaxed parent, but living in Berlin showed me how much I had absorbed of the modern American parenting style. Many U.S. adults who were born before 1980 grew up with a great deal more freedom than children do today. We walked to school alone and played outside until it got dark. We had hours of free time and could roam our neighborhoods with only peers for company.
Things have changed drastically in the past few decades, and many Americans believe that primary-school-age children need constant supervision. Some call this “overparenting” or “helicopter parenting,” but these terms only touch on the larger nature of the problem. What Americans are doing to our children is much more dangerous and pervasive.
We’ve created a culture of control. In the name of safety and academic achievement, we have stripped kids of fundamental rights and freedoms: the freedom to move, to be alone for even a few minutes, to take risks, to play, to think for themselves—and it’s not just parents who are doing this. It’s culture-wide. It’s the schools, which have cut or minimized recess or free play and control children’s time even at home by assigning hours of homework. It’s the intense sports teams and extracurricular activities that fill up children’s evenings and weekends. It’s our exaggerated media that makes it seem like a child can be abducted by a stranger at any time—when in reality such kidnappings are extremely rare.
Mostly the culture of control is created by average people: our neighbors, friends, relatives, and even complete strangers who feel compelled to shame parents or even call the police if a child is left alone for a few minutes. These actions go way beyond “helicoptering.” The helicopters have landed. The army is on the ground, and our children are surrounded by people trying to control them.
Our current parenting culture goes against everything we Americans supposedly believe in as the “home of the free and the brave.” Instead we are instilling the opposite in our children: subjugation and fear. We are inhibiting their ability to grow up. There’s increasing evidence that our young adults are having trouble separating from their parents and that their mental and emotional problems have increased.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Ironically, Germany, the land once known for authoritarianism, today provides a compelling example for how we might do things differently.
Why German Parenting Matters
It is not easy to ignore what happens in Germany. I’ve heard American critics often dismiss successful policies and practices of European countries—for example, universal health care in Denmark or the great education system in Finland—because they have small and relatively uniform populations. You can’t say the same about Germany, a country geographically the size of the state of Montana with more than 82 million people crowded into it. (That’s more people than the population of California, Texas, and New York put together). Germany is also increasingly diverse: 16.4 million people, more than 20 percent of the population, come from an immigrant background.
Germany is also a world leader—economically and politically—and regularly appears at the top of lists of the most admired countries in the world, even beating the United States. This is an incredible rebound from the country that suffered a crushing defeat in World War II and was universally reviled for the crimes of the Holocaust. Germans have grappled with their Nazi past and actively looked for ways to ensure it never happens again, including changing how they raise and educate their children. If today’s Germans feel it is important to promote their children’s independence, then we Americans might do well to take a hard look at reasons why we do not.
I don’t intend to hold the entire country up as a uniform model. Germany has a range of regional and cultural differences, and just like people everywhere, German parents have a variety of opinions and parenting styles. However, during the six years I lived in Berlin, I did discover some interesting attitudes and practices that should be useful for American parents.
A good portion of this book will focus on the city of Berlin, not just because the majority of my experiences occurred in that city, but also because the capital city holds a unique position within Germany and, arguably, the world at large. As the epicenter of a reunified country, it represents the melding of the cultures from the former communist-controlled East with the more capitalist, U.S.-aligned West.
Berlin is not Paris. It is not a fancy place—in some places it’s downright gritty—and half of it seems to be under construction most of the time. As the city’s former mayor Klaus Wowereit once famously quipped: Berlin is “poor but sexy.” Young people, artists, and tech innovators are drawn to the city’s low rents and open culture. Berlin also attracts many families. It is a city in the process of being reborn culturally and literally: while Germany has a low birthrate overall, Berlin is in the midst of a baby boom.
While some of the attitudes I highlight in this book are specific to Berlin, many of the parenting practices are common throughout the country, such as encouraging young children to walk to school and talking to them honestly about the past. Whether in Berlin or in Munich, in the countryside or in the city, most Germans place a high priority on fostering self-reliance, independence, and responsibility in children. The parents and educators I’ve met backed up those values with real actions, letting children play and learn without constant supervision and correction, trusting them with simple tasks and choices, and giving them plenty of physical and intellectual room to grow into healthy, whole individuals.
I used to assume that America was the best, most free place to bring up my children, but living in Berlin shattered that notion, and I saw how far we had strayed in our parenting from our values of personal responsibility, self-reliance, and most of all, individual freedom.
Many American parents believe freedom means we are “free” to raise our children as we see fit, a nice sentiment on the surface, but too often this attitude means depriving children of their freedom. Today it is American parents, not Germans, who are more authoritarian: we constantly supervise our children, and direct their choices in education, activities, and future careers. This parenting style robs children of the ability to develop the attributes we supposedly hold most dear: personal responsibility and self-reliance.
At first I was surprised to find better ways to raise children to be free, responsible individuals in Germany. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Germans, after all, know something about the dangers of a culture of control. German parents worry too, but they refuse to let fear drive their interactions with their kids. They treat their children as capable beings worthy of trust, and, most important, they respect their children’s rights: to move freely, think for themselves, and ultimately as they grow older, to run their own lives.
My experiences in Germany made me question whether the many things that pass today in America as parenting “truths” are cultural, not universal. If they are cultural, that means we have the power to change them. I now believe that we Americans should value our children’s rights more highly, not just for the sake of their childhoods but for our future as a democratic society. We cannot claim to value freedom if we raise children who never have a chance to experience it.
Copyright © 2017 by Sara Zaske
