Achtung Baby by Sara Zaske

Author:Sara Zaske [Zaske, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349418544
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2018-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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 papers 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.

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