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WORK TITLE: Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://sarazaske.com/
CITY: San Francisco
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: two.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as to websites, including Atlantic.com and Time.com.
SIDELIGHTS
Sara Zaske is a journalist and writer of nonfiction books. She has contributed articles articles to publications, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and to websites, including Atlantic.com and Time.com.
In 2017, Zaske released her first book, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children. In this volume, she discusses the observations she made on German parenting while she was living in Germany for over six years. Zaske notes that German parents give their children more freedom than do typical American parents, which leads to German children becoming more independent and capable.
In an interview with Suchitra Shenoy Packer, contributor to the Parent Voice website, Zaske stated: “My childhood was fairly free—at least in terms of physical mobility. I played outside until my mother called me in for dinner. It is only recently that Americans have become so overprotective. Living in Germany made me take a hard look at why I wasn’t parenting like I was raised.” Zaske added: “Helicoptering or overparenting has become the dominant style of parenting in America, and it is the most damaging because it is based on fear, often exaggerated fear, and it’s very pervasive. It’s not just individual parents, but the society around us that seeks to constantly control children. For instance, the after-school activities that force a parent to come in and sign their kid in and out—that precludes a child walking to the activity by themselves.” Zaske continued: “Or the ‘busy body’ neighbors and strangers who call the police when they see a child alone in a car or walking by themselves. This culture instills fear in children and assumes that children are incapable of even the simplest things like being alone for a few minutes. Children need just the opposite of this culture. They need people who will support their moves toward independence.”
In a lengthy article in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik compared Achtung Baby to other books about parenting lessons from other countries, including Bringing Up Bebe. Gopnik argued: “What’s wrong with such books is not that we can’t learn a lot from other people’s ‘parenting principles’ but that, invariably, you get the problems along with the principles. … You can wonder whether the German molding system leaves German kids molded quite so thoroughly as Zaske, an American long resident in Berlin, insists.” Gopnik added: “In her depiction, the new German style of child rearing remains, well, extremely German: here are the most highly organized forms of not being highly organized that have ever existed. Nowhere else, it seems, will you find such tightly controlled varieties of freedom, such militarized ordering of open-ended play, such centralized rules for creative anarchy.” Gopnik continued: “The style of middle-class child rearing that the Germans and the French and the rest might help us escape from is really more handcuff than helicopter, with the parent and the child both, like the man and woman agents in a sixties spy movie, shackled to the same valise-in this case, the one that carries not the secret plans for a bomb but the college-admission papers. Until we get to that final destination, we’ll never be apart.”
Other assessments of the book were more favorable. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “Zaske makes a strong argument that German parenting practices are creating smarter and more productive … children.” Julia M. Reffner, critic in School Library Journal, described the book as “a compelling cultural study that will interest all those who wish to learn about German culture, as well as American parents and educators.” Writing in USA Today, Anne Godlasky remarked: “It’s hardly the first time Americans have looked to other cultures for child-rearing clues. … But unlike many parenting books, Zaske’s is not judgmental, prescriptive or didactic. For that, American parents may soon be saying danke and sending Achtung up the charts, too.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
New Yorker, January 29, 2018, Adam Gopnik, “The Parenting Paradox,” review of Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, p. 65.
Publishers Weekly, September 4, 2017, review of Achtung Baby, p. 85.
School Library Journal, March, 2018, Julia M. Reffner, review of Achtung Baby, p. 149.
USA Today, January 4, 2018, Anne Godlasky, review of Achtung Baby, p. 5D.
ONLINE
London Daily Mail Online, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ (January 4, 2018), Helen Brown, review of Achtung Baby.
Parent Voice, https://www.theparentvoice.com/ (January 25, 2018), Suchitra Shenoy Packer, author interview.
Sara Zaske Website, https://sarazaske.com/ (May 6, 2018).
Slate, https://slate.com/ (February 8, 2018), Rebecca Schuman, review of Achtung Baby.
Sara Zaske is an American writer who lived in Berlin for six and a half years. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic.com, and Time.com among other places. She is the author of the book ACHTUNG BABY: AN AMERICAN MOM ON THE GERMAN ART OF RAISING SELF-RELIANT CHILDREN published by Picador in January 2018. She now lives in Idaho with her husband and two children.
www.sarazaske.com
QUOTED: "My childhood was fairly free—at least in terms of physical mobility. I played outside until my mother called me in for dinner. It is only recently that Americans have become so overprotective. Living in Germany made me take a hard look at why I wasn’t parenting like I was raised."
"Helicoptering or overparenting has become the dominant style of parenting in America, and it is the most damaging because it is based on fear, often exaggerated fear, and it’s very pervasive. It’s not just individual parents, but the society around us that seeks to constantly control children. For instance, the after-school activities that force a parent to come in and sign their kid in and out—that precludes a child walking to the activity by themselves."
"Or the 'busy body' neighbors and strangers who call the police when they see a child alone in a car or walking by themselves. This culture instills fear in children and assumes that children are incapable of even the simplest things like being alone for a few minutes. Children need just the opposite of this culture. They need people who will support their moves toward independence."
Achtung Baby: Interview with Author, Sara Zaske
SUCHITRA SHENOY PACKER JAN 25TH, 2018 0
Achtung Baby: Interview with Author, Sara Zaske
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Suchitra Shenoy Packer
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Suchitra has previously worked as a journalist, a PR officer, and a professor. She is currently a stay-at-home-working-mom to two multiracial kids, the inspiration behind theParentVoice,.
Continuing our discussion on What is Wrong with “American” Parenting? Insights into and Lessons from Danish and German Parenting, we present an exclusive interview with Sara Zaske who’s book, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children released earlier this month.
Although we would have liked to chat more and get answers to all our questions, Sara, understandably, is on a book tour making media appearances, interviews, book readings, and so on. Amidst her travels, she found time to answer our more important questions and we present them to you, our readers.
Whether you choose to agree or disagree with Ms. Zaske, her responses certainly provoke some reflections on our own styles of parenting. We would love to hear from you. Feel free to comment at the end of the interview or write directly to theteam@theparentvoice.com
1. Over the years of living in Germany and now having returned to the US, can you tell our readers about (a) (examples) how you came face-to-face with what potentially were your own cultural norms when it came to parenting while in Germany– (b) how you acknowledged that they may be wrong (because, they may have been misguided – see below #5), (c) how you then made sense of them in the context of new parenting lessons you learned in Germany, and eventually (d) developed your own parenting style?
There are many examples of this in the book; the most obvious is children walking to school by themselves and in general engaging in unsupervised play:
I walked my daughter to school every day in second grade and part of third grade, even when all the other children her age were walking or biking by themselves. The teacher at her school had also taught them traffic safety and taken the whole class out for a walking tour of the neighborhood to help prepare them to walk on their own. Sophia campaigned to walk to school on her own, and I could not deny the simple fact that hundreds of children are doing this all over Berlin, and they were fine. When I finally did let her go on her own—it was wonderful. She was so proud and independent. She would get up in the morning, make her own snack, pack her bag, and say goodbye to me at our front door. Now back in the US both my children, who are now 8 and 11, walk to school every day.
The ability to play without parents hovering or interfering is critical to learning social skills and ultimately to growing up. CLICK TO TWEET
Another example is the time I came to pick my daughter up from a play date in Berlin and found her and her friend across the street at the playground by themselves. They were eight at the time. This is normal in Berlin, but it is not normal for Americans. Again, I started to realize how important it was that kids have this independence. The ability to play without parents hovering or interfering is critical to learning social skills and ultimately to growing up. Now in the US, my kids go to the park down the street when they want—I make them take a flip phone and insist that they stay together, but those are my only concessions to the American cultural sense of safety.
Sara Zaske
2. Understandably, if one has had a happy childhood and has a good relationship with one’s parents/caregivers, one may attempt to replicate a similar parenting style. After having learned German ways of doing things, how did you reconcile your own childhood experiences (and what you knew) with those that you learned?
My childhood was fairly free—at least in terms of physical mobility. I played outside until my mother called me in for dinner. It is only recently that Americans have become so overprotective. Living in Germany made me take a hard look at why I wasn’t parenting like I was raised.
Living in Germany made me take a hard look at why I wasn’t parenting like I was raised. CLICK TO TWEET
The one area that is different from how I was raised is intellectual freedom. Germans do not hide information from children the way we do in the US. They talk openly and teach children early about sex, religion, death and of course, the darker parts of their history. These topics have always been somewhat taboo in the US when it comes to children. I now see this as a serious mistake. These issues are a huge part of life, and to deny children access to information about them puts them at a tremendous disadvantage as adults. A clear example is sex education, which is taught in German schools and openly discussed, while in the US, many parents delay or never discuss it with their kids and sex education in school is inconsistent at best. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the more informed German teenagers have lower rates of teen pregnancy, abortion and HIV than their US peers.
3. Personally, from having grown up in India, having married a Canadian, having learned about parenting and being a parent in the US, and having read a lot of different kinds of parenting books, I have my own hybrid form of parenting. Was this ever something you thought of doing – Combining the elements of parenting across the two cultures to which you were exposed?
I don’t think you can avoid combining parenting methods especially if you live in a foreign country. It’s impossible to ever escape your home culture completely, and when you are immersed in another parenting culture, you have to adapt.
4. From reading the book, it appears that after an initial culture shock, you completely embraced German ways and if I could go as far as to say, “went native” and with good reason(s). Would that be a fair assessment of where you stand with regard to parenting values?
Yes, near the end of our time there. I was still more cautious than most German parents, but way more relaxed than most Americans. I was caught somewhere in the middle.
Achtung Baby5. You call some core American parenting values (such as, correcting children, constant supervision, emphasizing academic achievement, prioritizing safety) as misguided and you elaborate on these throughout your book. For our readers who have not read the book, would you please identify these values (or some of them) and briefly tell us why you find these values misguided? (also see #9 below)
Please take some of my answers to this from the book, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children.
6. How do you think Americans are parenting differently now than they did, say, 30 years ago? Of the many new “trends” – helicopter, free-range, attachment, etc…what one turn do you think has been the worst (or best) for American parenting (and kids)?
Helicoptering or overparenting has become the dominant style of parenting in America, and it is the most damaging because it is based on fear, often exaggerated fear, and it’s very pervasive. It’s not just individual parents, but the society around us that seeks to constantly control children. For instance, the after-school activities that force a parent to come in and sign their kid in and out – that precludes a child walking to the activity by themselves. Or the “busy body” neighbors and strangers who call the police when they see a child alone in a car or walking by themselves. This culture instills fear in children and assumes that children are incapable of even the simplest things like being alone for a few minutes. Children need just the opposite of this culture. They need people who will support their moves toward independence.
7. I agree with you that the American parenting landscape has gotten to a point of extreme paranoia. Whereas, for example, kids in other countries are allowed free movement, we tend to be overcautious, live in perpetual fear of them being kidnapped or something equally bad or worse happening to them, or getting a scrape or a cut in the playground!! You recruit several evidence based research, statistics, and such to demonstrate that there really is no need for this kind of a ‘culture of control’. Understood.
Now, how do you spread this message to engender a change in behavior? The transition to this culture of control was a gradual one, so what needs to change for us, now, as a society to go back to “the good old days” or rather, get past our anxieties and return to rational parenting?
The simple act of letting your child do something like walk to school by themselves or go to the store to buy something, empowers other parents to do the same.
Our young adults are not prepared to be independent. CLICK TO TWEET
More than that, I think what will change our parenting culture the most is seeing the result of the current parenting style: our young adults are not prepared to be independent. Parenting based on fear inhibits children’s ability to grow up, and we are seeing more young adults today with anxiety and depression. They are having a harder time separating from their parents and managing their own lives. That’s a heavy cost.
We cannot make the world completely safe for our children, and we cannot determine their future success for them. At some point, every child has to learn how to deal with risk and manage their own lives by themselves. We do our children a huge disservice if we give them no practice in self-reliance until they are 18 and then expect them to learn it all at once.
Parenting based on fear inhibits children’s ability to grow up, and we are seeing more young adults today with anxiety and depression. CLICK TO TWEET
Achtung Baby
8. Why does American parenting gather such flak from parenting writers? What do we do so wrong that makes everyone in the world appear to be doing a much better job at raising their kids than us?
I think there’s a lot of criticism in recent years because American parenting has become quite extreme.We have become very controlling of our kids. This is dangerous not only for our kids but for our future as a society.
Some call it helicoptering or overparenting. I think psychologist Peter Gray describes it best as “protective-directive” parenting, and I believe it is primarily driven by fear. We fear for our children’s safety so we protect them by constantly supervising them, never letting them have a moment alone. We fear for their future success so we direct all their academic and extracurricular activities, monitoring every slight fluctuation in their grades. When taken the extreme, American parents are organizing every waking moment of their children’s lives through adolescence even into young adulthood. Children raised this way have a hard time growing up because they are never allowed to do anything on their own, and never really make their own choices or their own mistakes. Logically we can see the problem with this – you can’t become independent and responsible adults if you are never given any independence or responsibility. We are also seeing an increase anxiety and depression among college-age adults.
I don’t know if everywhere else in the world does a better job, but we can learn from other cultures. We can certainly learn something from Germans about raising kids for self-reliance.
I’m a writer who has bounced from the US to Germany and back again.
My articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic.com, Time.com, and Bild am Sonntag among other places. My book about how Germans raise self-reliant kids, Achtung Baby, is due out from Picador USA January 2, 2018.
My agent is the fabulous Terra Chalberg of Chalberg & Sussman You can see my full CV on LinkedIn.
I am also a fiction writer. My young adult fantasy novel The First, is currently available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I also have two free sci-fi short stories up on Smashwords: Green and The Last Zoo. Check them out.
Contact: post here or email SaraZaskeBlog@gmail.com.
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QUOTED: "What's wrong with such books is not that we can't learn a lot from other people's 'parenting principles' but that, invariably, you get the problems along with the principles. ... You can wonder whether the German molding system leaves German kids molded quite so thoroughly as Zaske, an American long resident in Berlin, insists."
"In her depiction, the new German style of child rearing remains, well, extremely German: here are the most highly organized forms of not being highly organized that have ever existed. Nowhere else, it seems, will you find such tightly controlled varieties of freedom, such militarized ordering of open-ended play, such centralized rules for creative anarchy."
"The style of middle-class child rearing that the Germans and the French and the rest might help us escape from is really more handcuff than helicopter, with the parent and the child both, like the man and woman agents in a sixties spy movie, shackled to the same valise-in this case, the one that carries not the secret plans for a bomb but the college-admission papers. Until we get to that final destination, we'll never be apart."
The Parenting Paradox
Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker. 93.46 (Jan. 29, 2018): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Adam Gopnik
The Parenting Paradox
Does child rearing have to be a competitive sport?
We know we've come to a crossroads when German childhood is being held up as an idealized model for Americans. It was, after all, Teutonic styles of child rearing that were once viewed with disgust-as in "The Sound of Music," for a long time the most popular of all American movies, with all those over-regimented Trapp kids rescued by wearing the bedroom drapes and singing scales. But Sara Zaske's "Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children" (Picador) is perhaps an inevitable follow-up to "Bringing Up Bebe," that best-selling book about parenting the way the French supposedly do it-basically, as though the kids were little grownups, presumably ready for adultery and erotic appetites. So why not move eastward through Europe, until we get the book on parenting the Moldavian way?
What's wrong with such books is not that we can't learn a lot from other people's "parenting principles" but that, invariably, you get the problems along with the principles. French kids are often sensitive and unspoiled in ways that American kids aren't; they are also often driven so crazy by the enervating 8:30 A.M.-to-4:30 P.M. school system and by a tradition of remote parenting that they rebel as bitterly as American adolescents do, only putting off the rebellion until they're forty, when the sex and drugs really start to kick in. And you can wonder whether the German molding system leaves German kids molded quite so thoroughly as Zaske, an American long resident in Berlin, insists.
In her depiction, the new German style of child rearing remains, well, extremely German: here are the most highly organized forms of not being highly organized that have ever existed. Nowhere else, it seems, will you find such tightly controlled varieties of freedom, such militarized ordering of open-ended play, such centralized rules for creative anarchy. Kids aren't merely encouraged not to be dependent on toys; there is a "toy-free" month when no one at the day-care center is allowed to play with them. Adolescents are not only indulged in their freewheeling impulses; whole parks are specifically set aside for their explorations. "In addition to park areas designed for them, adolescents can go into almost all places in Berlin, including dance clubs and bars," Zaske writes. "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." (Could these fine-print rules be effectively enforced anywhere except in Germany?) German parents don't merely not hover; they refuse to hover, on considered principle, and send the kids off to school and back, after having digested the odds of a child's being snatched along the way and, sensibly enough, decided that it's a safe bet they won't be.
And here we arrive at the real ghost that haunts these books, the one that sends us to Paris or Berlin for help: the sense that American parents have gone radically wrong, making themselves and their kids miserable in the process, by hovering over them like helicopters instead of observing them from a watchtower, at a safe distance. The helicopter metaphor is an odd one, since helicopters can often only hover, helplessly, as in the Vietnam-era newsreels, as the action goes on below. The style of middle-class child rearing that the Germans and the French and the rest might help us escape from is really more handcuff than helicopter, with the parent and the child both, like the man and woman agents in a sixties spy movie, shackled to the same valise-in this case, the one that carries not the secret plans for a bomb but the college-admission papers. Until we get to that final destination, we'll never be apart.
In "Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies" (Knopf), Ann Hulbert seems to be taking up the opposite end of the child-rearing stick; rather than ordinary kids with ordinary parents, these are the outliers, right here in America. Yet her book shares some themes with the Europhile ones. There's the same agonizing question of American achievement: What can we learn, in a society dedicated to high-achieving children, from children who seem "naturally" off the charts in their achievements? How can we make our children less anxious while still making sure that they achieve? Are prodigies a race apart, or are they merely more persistent than other kids? (As Hulbert cautions, the paradox of the self-made prodigy is that persistence itself is an inborn gift, as odd as any other.) The arguments seem to echo ancient religious ones-mysterious innate grace does battle with hard-won grit, Catholics vs. Protestants in undersized clothing-which may be a giveaway that what's at stake is ethical before it's educational.
Hulbert's book is smart-as all her books have been, particularly the child-centric "Raising America"-and often sad. There seems nothing more melancholy than the fate of prodigies. The book takes us from William James Sidis and Norbert Wiener, Jewish prodigies at Harvard at the beginning of the twentieth century (Sidis was the subject of a profile by James Thurber, of all people, in these pages), to their seeming successors in Silicon Valley, the hero-nerds who have become as much an American typology as the enfants sauvages of France ever were. Along the way, we encounter the big names in prodigy-land, among them Philippa Schuyler, the African-American child genius of the nineteen-thirties and forties (and also the subject of a New Yorker profile, by Joseph Mitchell), and Bobby Fischer, the chess-playing son of Jewish Communists, who ended up a crazed anti-Semite. That many of these kids, despite being outliers, have already been much documented suggests that we use mental prodigies the way Renaissance people used physical prodigies (the boy-wolf, the fish-woman): that is, to prove a moral point. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill's breakdown was a cautionary tale about being stuffed with too much knowledge; Louisa May Alcott included an ex-prodigy of this kind in "Little Men" to show the danger. We watch movies about Bobby Fischer in part because his is a touching story and in part because we are secretly glad that our kids, though not prodigious, are at least not that.
Hulbert does the good work, throughout, of resisting morals or too neat generalizations; one suspects that the alliterative "Lessons" in her subtitle was a publisher's creation. Some prodigies are pushed; some do the pushing from within. Sidis had a bleak life after Harvard: never quite finding his footing, he self-published speculative manuscripts on the second law of thermodynamics, the crank's specialty, and obsessively collected street-car transfers. But Norbert Wiener, who spent his career at M.I.T., became one of the most significant scientists of his era, the founder of cybernetics and a pioneer in information theory. He suffered from depression, it's true, but was no more miserable than many other tenured professors. Philippa Schuyler had a terribly unhappy adulthood; Hulbert produces a heartbreaking letter of indictment that, in her late twenties, she wrote to her pushy, well-meaning mother. Yet Shirley Temple, her show-biz counterpart in the thirties (she was, as Hulbert points out, the first white female ever to dance with a black man onscreen, albeit in a movie where she wears a Confederate cap), went on to have a successful life as a Republican politico and diplomat.
The math prodigies are set somewhat apart from the more general-capacity prodigies, being seemingly possessed of a weird bit of wiring more than an over-all enhanced capacity for learning to do things. The math kids don't learn math by studying math, the way the rest of us do; they learn math the way the rest of us learn language. Hulbert picks her way through the minefield of "spectrum" or "savant" kids and the question of whether what we call autism, with its bestowal of exceptionally close and persistent focus on some object, can be a help in the arts and sciences. There appear to be as many learning styles among prodigies as there are prodigies to express them. Bobby Fischer turns out to be, in most ways, a freak, an outlier among outliers. His incipient paranoia provided a wonderful advantage in playing a game that depends on paranoia-Is that pawn sneaking up on me from behind? It isn't threatening now, but, in four moves, I can see that knight becoming my fatal enemy!-and ruined him as a person. His wasn't a general intelligence deliberately adapted to a game; it was a game-playing octopus-eyed gift that crowded out his general intelligence.
The tricky thing, which Hulbert doesn't oversell, is that, on the whole and with the expected exceptions, exactly the kind of hover parenting that we rightly deplore does seem to be essential to the kind of hyperachievement that we admire. The Chinese piano prodigy Lang Lang, whom Hulbert writes about at length, was driven relentlessly by his father. "Lang Lang's mother and father joined a generation of parents who, not surprisingly, focused on the futures of their 'little emperors' with an intensity that pushed traditional Confucian tenets of 'family education' to extremes," she writes. The piano was hauled into the living room, and five- and six-hour daily sessions of practice were imposed by the time Lang Lang was seven.
As Hulbert points out, our own pet prejudices would predict a boy crushed under the pressure, which seems at times to have been deep-dive-submarine intense. But Lang Lang emerged as a fine musician and about as well adjusted as any artist can hope to be. The grit theory of achievement seems justified by the results, if the results are what you're after. We wince at the brutality of parents who ship their young kids around to perform for adults at the expense of their childhood-but, then, that was Mozart's childhood, and though by the end Mozart may have wished for less attention as a kid performer and more as a grownup composer, he never for a moment wished not to be Mozart.
For every prodigy doomed to misery by early success, we can cite another who started off strong and kept going. It's significant that we tend not to judge prodigies in sports too harshly. Wayne Gretzky was a goal-scoring genius in hockey by the age of ten and had a true tiger father, albeit a mild Canadian kind, who trained him in the back-yard ice rink. Yet we don't usually criticize such parents, or expect their offspring to become exemplars of a life well lived, because we understand that there's a time fuse burning on athletic achievement. Nobody looks at Gretzky now and feels sorry for him, though his post-athletic life has been about as hit-or-miss as any other prodigy's. We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn't his platform for a lifetime's achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance.
The secrets of that kind of athletic achievement are the subject of Karen Crouse's book "Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town's Secret to Happiness and Excellence" (Simon & Schuster). Crouse, a Times sportswriter disillusioned by drug-enhanced results and joyless competitions, stumbled on Norwich in the midst of her travels with more or less the same stunned enthusiasm with which Ronald Colman, in the movie "Lost Horizon," stumbles on Shangri-La. In Norwich, no parent presses, no bar is set, and after a kid scores two goals in a soccer game he is sat down so that some other kid has a chance to score. Yet Norwich continually sends athletes to the Olympics and other competitions in numbers ridiculously disproportionate to its size.
What we don't get to see, in Crouse's account, is the little town nearby, where, as must be the case, everyone coeperates and yet no one is a champion. (And there must also be, in Norwich, at least one Holden Caulfield type who thinks the whole Norwich thing is phony.) Looking at Norwich, we're told that the non-competitive, non-pressuring approach is best because it gets us to the medal stand, or close. But what if it didn't? If Norwich values matter, it's because they're good, not because they're shortcuts to victory. The point of a non-competitive attitude can't be that it makes us better able to compete; the value of an unpressured approach can't be that it creates a more effective kind of pressure. In any case, one has the sense that what Crouse has found is not a "secret" but a well-known effect: unusual excellence emerges within tightly structured local traditions, whether they are in fifteenth-century Florence, in painting, or in San Pedro de Macores, the "cradle of shortstops." One good painter with an apprentice produces a Renaissance, just as one good coach with willing kids supplies the major leagues.
But are results what we're after? Timed and scored competitions aside, the results are far more relative to the eye of the beholder than any account of high-pressure child rearing can quite allow. Lang Lang's six-hour-a-day training certainly produced a fast-fingered fiend, but also, to many music-critics' ears, merely a fast-fingered fiend, more loud than lyrical. Then again, Mitsuko Uchida, a Japanese prodigy of an earlier vintage, is as sensitive a pianist as exists; prodigies are particulars first of all. With all the effort in the world, the results of cramming kids are likely to be more ambiguous than we can predict, not because the child rearing was done wrong but because all such results tend to be ambiguous.
What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids' point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement-the competition won, the reward secured. The mystery of mastery, felt in the child's mind or muscles, is more compelling than the concreteness of achievement, the trophy pressed in her hands. What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle. Philippe Petit didn't walk the wire between the Twin Towers by working harder while he was up there; he worked hard to get to a state where it would never feel like work.
Lang Lang admits to the brutal pressures placed on him by his father, and, though he does it nicely, he blames his father for overstressing him. He was saved because he had, as Hulbert writes, "carved out space for a version of the 'autotelic experience'-absorption in an activity purely for its own sake, a specialty of childhood." Following the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hulbert maintains that it was being caught in "the flow," the feeling of the sudden loss of oneself in an activity, that preserved Lang Lang's sanity: "The prize always beckoned, but Lang was finding ways to get lost in the process." There's a similarly lovely scene in Hulbert's book of Shirley Temple learning to tap-dance with Bill Robinson, who told her to "get your feet attached to your ears"; the moment was bright enough to stay with her forever after. The process was not only more important than the prize morally; it was more essential than the prize existentially. By the time that Temple was an adult, most of the money she had made was gone. But the moment of learning, matching ears to feet with Bill Robinson, left her with a lifetime of confidence.
Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all. The prizes are inevitably disappointing, even when we get them (as the life of Bob Dylan, prize-getter and grump extraordinaire, suggests). It is, perhaps, necessary only that we like the process as we seek the prize. Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry.
What really helicopters over these books is what one might call the Causal Catastrophe: the belief that the proof of the rightness or wrongness of some way of bringing up children is in the kinds of adults it produces. This appears, on the surface, so uncontroversial a position-what other standard would you use?-that to question it seems a little crazy. But, after all, chains of human causality are, if not infinite, very long; in every life, some bad consequence of your upbringing will eventually emerge. We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won't pay off later-it might; it does!-but because it's obnoxious now. Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it's in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, once the rug is pulled out from under their occupation. If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then all chains are infinitely weak, since everybody ends up broken.
Childhood should not be considered a chain of causes leading to an ultimate effect: you do this so that will happen. The popular motto of stoic acceptance, "It is what it is," should be replaced by a stronger motto, embracing existence: "What is is what is." The reason we don't want our kids to watch violent movies is not that doing so will turn them into psychos when they grow up; it's that we don't want them seeing bloody movies now. As the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen said, after the unimaginable loss of a child drowned (in words famously adapted by Tom Stoppard in "The Coast of Utopia"), "Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. . . . Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late."
Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once. The trick is accepting limits while insisting on standards. Character may not be malleable, but behavior is. The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one-the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective. The one artisanal, teachable thing is outer conduct. You can't restructure a genome, but, as Mr. Turveydrop, in "Bleak House," insisted, you really can teach deportment.
A clue may be present here in the truth, which Hulbert reports, that many "spectrum" kids can be taught-with painful effort, but, still, they can be-to behave more or less normally (no scare quotes on the word; a norm is a norm even if it isn't a virtue) through careful inculcation and rote repetition. Teaching kids to become something other than what they were born to be is probably impossible; teaching them to behave in ways that seem unnatural to them at the start is actually not that hard. As satirists have pointed out for millennia, civilized behavior is artificial and ridiculous: it means pretending to be glad to see people you aren't glad to see, praising parties you wished you hadn't gone to, thanking friends for presents you wish you hadn't received. Training kids to feign a passion is the art of parenting. The passions they really have belong only to them.
Nothing works in child rearing because everything works. If kids are happy and absorbed, in the flow, that's all we can ask of them, in Berlin or in Brooklyn. Nothing works in the long run, but the mistake lies in thinking that the long run is the one that counts. Crouse, in her annals of Norwich, tells the nice story of Mike Holland, a local ski jumper, who at one point in his career became the first ever to jump six hundred and ten feet. The record lasted less than half an hour; Matti Nykenen, a Finn and a much better ski jumper, broke it shortly afterward. But every time Holland watches video of his briefly held record jump "the hairs on his neck stand at attention." For twenty-seven minutes, he had accomplished something wonderful. It was enough to sustain a life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gopnik, Adam. "The Parenting Paradox." The New Yorker, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527378183/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5b599828. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527378183
QUOTED: "Zaske makes a strong argument that German parenting practices are creating smarter and more productive ... children."
Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children
Publishers Weekly. 264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p85.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children
Sara Zaske. Picador, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-250-16017-1
Zaske does what any American journalist would do upon moving to Berlin with her husband and with a two-year-old in tow--she starts noticing and researching how Germans raise their children. In doing so, she makes a case for the country's relaxed approach to child rearing as a welcome alternative to the more hands-on American style. With both parents able to take up to three years of partially paid parental leave, childcare in Germany is seen as a manageable task for working parents, and not as a touchstone for guilt, shame, and longing. Moreover, German parents, Zaske notes, are generally hands-off at the playground and otherwise, and children begin to walk to school unsupervised in second grade. Children also aren't sheltered in the classroom, where they learn the facts of life at seven. The book is more than a memoir. Supported by statistics and research studies, Zaske makes a strong argument that German parenting practices are creating smarter and more productive parents and children alike. Agent: Terra Chalberg, Chalberg& Sussman. (Jan. 2018)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 85. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468132/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2873ad68. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468132
QUOTED: "a compelling cultural study that will interest all those who wish to learn about German culture, as well as American parents and educators."
ZASKE, Sara. Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self Reliant Children
Julia M. Reffner
School Library Journal. 64.3 (Mar. 2018): p149.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* ZASKE, Sara. Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self Reliant Children. 256p. Picador. Jan. 2018. Tr $26. ISBN 9781250160171.
Channeling readers of Pamela Druckerman's Bringing Up Bebe and Alison Gopnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter, Zaske's work describes how the author moved from Oregon to Berlin after the birth of her son and, in the midst of the transition, found herself expecting her second child. In comic tones, Zaske shares the thrill and tumult of adjusting to a new culture, vastly different from her expectations. As opposed to the stereotype of strict, overbearing German parent, Zaske found "free-range" was the norm for childhood. In Germany today, children are encouraged to walk to school on their own and talk honestly about the Holocaust and other painful moments in the past. The priority is raising children who are self-reliant, independent, and responsible: a stark contrast, says Zaske, to the results some experts see from American children in the "helicopter" parenting era. From the birth process (in which midwives are the most common attendants) to early childhood (child care is considered a right, and "kita" schools provide playtime instead of the more rigorous American-style education) to elementary school (where topics such as sex, death, and nudity are a part of everyday conversations and outdoor time is enforced daily), Zaske compares American and German parenting culture and gives the U.S. reader inspiration to explore new methods. VERDICT A compelling cultural study that will interest all those who wish to learn about German culture, as well as American parents and educators.--Julia M. Reffner, Richmond, VA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Reffner, Julia M. "ZASKE, Sara. Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self Reliant Children." School Library Journal, Mar. 2018, p. 149. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529863749/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e1a64edd. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529863749
QUOTED: "It's hardly the first time Americans have looked to other cultures for child-rearing clues. ... But unlike many parenting books, Zaske's is not judgmental, prescriptive or didactic. For that, American parents may soon be saying danke and sending Achtung up the charts, too."
'Achtung Baby': Germany schools us on raising kids
Anne Godlasky
USA Today. (Jan. 4, 2018): Lifestyle: p05D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Anne Godlasky, USA TODAY
America may be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it's Germany whose children display independence and whose parents have the courage to step back, Sara Zaske writes in Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children (Picador, 239 pp., ***).
Zaske and her husband left Oregon for Germany, toddler in tow. They welcomed a baby boy shortly after moving to Berlin, so they experienced everything from childbirth to grade school as expat parents.
Differences are notable from the get-go, from baby's sleep (only one in five German parents stay in the room as their wee ones nod off) to government-subsidized, overwhelmingly common early child care, which Zaske says leads to less "mom guilt."
Many of the differences Zaske points out between Germany and the USA could also be made about 1970s America and today's. Many kids in Germany, like American kids before helicopter parenting, Zaske writes:
Spend more time outdoors.
Walk or bike to and from school or the playground by themselves -- a move that in the U.S. can result in having the police called on you.
Enjoy what is now sometimes called "free play" -- formerly known as simply "play" -- without direction from parents, teachers or coaches.
Zaske puts it plainly: "We raise free and responsible children by giving them freedom and responsibility."
One German method may have you rethinking all those Christmas gifts: toy-free time. For weeks or months, many preschools and kindergartens throughout Germany (and Switzerland and Austria) remove toys from their classrooms. Children, instead, must use their imaginations. How many times has a toy proven less popular than the box in which it arrived?
Though Zaske is not an anthropologist or child psychologist, Achtung Baby is well-sourced, citing research from non-partisan heavyweights such as the Pew Research Center and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She compares German and American parents' individual mindsets as well as the social structures that feed them.
German parents, too, have an irrational fear of their children being kidnapped. Yet they believe it is not only important for their kids to learn selbstAaAaAeAnndigkeit, or self-reliance, but that it's wrong f parents to stand in the way. These ideals are reinforced by school and government policies that allow for play rather than test preparation and family time rather than overscheduling.
It's hardly the first time Americans have looked to other cultures for child-rearing clues. This decade brought us Bringing Up BAaAaAeA@bAaAaAeA@ Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which focused on Americans raising children the French and Chinese way, respectively.
But unlike many parenting books, Zaske's is not judgmental, prescriptive or didactic. For that, American parents may soon be saying danke and sending Achtung up the charts, too.
CAPTION(S):
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Godlasky, Anne. "'Achtung Baby': Germany schools us on raising kids." USA Today, 4 Jan. 2018, p. 05D. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521515016/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ff800d16. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A521515016
Let your children run free — German style: A mother shares how moving country gave her children permission to be themselves
Sara Zaske discusses the culture shock of moving to Germany from America
Her new book reveals how children in Germany are taught to become self-reliant
She shares how her experience gave permission for her to be herself
By Helen Brown For The Daily Mail
PUBLISHED: 22:02 BST, 4 January 2018 | UPDATED: 11:02 BST, 5 January 2018
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ACHTUNG BABY
by Sara Zaske (Piatkus £14.99)
Achtung, kids!’ yelled Sara Zaske as she chased her young children through the streets of Berlin. She was frightened they were cycling too fast.
But when they eventually came to a halt, she realised they were more worried about her reaction than any physical risks they had been taking.
As she struggled to catch her breath and reiterate her rules on speed, she realised ‘how awfully hard I was trying to control them. I had rarely heard a German teacher or parent shout “achtung” at children, a term reserved for strong danger. They have a greater trust in their children’s ability to look out for themselves.’
Zaske, a journalist, moved from Oregon, America, to Berlin in 2010, when her husband, a scientist, was offered a great job there. She realised she could maintain her writing career and hoped her two-year-old, Sophia, would benefit from a bilingual childhood. But the family had a culture shock in store.
Sara Zaske compares the difference between American and German parenting based on her experience in a new book +2
Sara Zaske compares the difference between American and German parenting based on her experience in a new book
When they took Sophia for her first day at kita (short for ‘kindertagesstatte’) they were ‘greeted with chaos’. Children were shouting, hurling toys around and clambering up and down the ladder to a high loft space.
While most U.S. kindergartens place the emphasis on academic hothousing, their German equivalents focus on the social and emotional skills developed through play. It’s all part of the German commitment to raising children with ‘selbstandigkeit’: self-reliance.
It took a serious leap of faith for Zaske to shelve her ingrained, competitive anxiety over her daughter’s education and leave her sunny little girl in this pandemonium. She knew mothers back in the U.S. were following Baby Einstein programmes and spending every hour of the day with their little ones.
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But soon she realised she was walking away from the kita not just without her daughter, but without the guilt heaped upon American mothers who put their children into childcare.
In Germany, it is a child’s right and privilege, not misfortune, to be enriched by the social experience of nursery. Home-schooling is against the law.
Sophia’s kita offered regular trips to local parks, child-led projects and even sleepovers — and it came at a fraction of the cost of American childcare. No wonder between 92 and 98 per cent of German children aged between three and five are enrolled, compared with only 23.4 per cent in America.
ACHTUNG BABY by Sara Zaske (Piatkus £14.99) +2
ACHTUNG BABY by Sara Zaske (Piatkus £14.99)
Sophia flourished, and by the time her brother Ozzie was born, Zaske would hand him over to the kita with delight. She watched them both learn to make their own choices in the German playgrounds that initially struck her as terrifying. She learned to step back philosophically, too, allowing her children to navigate their own way through ideas of religion and mortality gently introduced by their teachers.
She saw them make giggling sense of early years sex education and realised it left them better protected against abuse and less ashamed of their bodies.
Although she was shocked to discover that the age of consent is 14 in Germany, she comforted herself with the fact that the teen birth rate is three-and-a-half times lower than in the U.S. The abortion rate is four-and-a-half times lower and the HIV rate is three-and-a-half times lower.
Worried about letting Sophia walk the streets of Berlin alone, she consulted a friend who said: ‘The smartest thing to do is let go a little bit — and make sure they go to karate class.’
The six years Zaske and her family spent in Berlin convinced them that modern ‘helicopter parenting’ is damaging the very people it aims to protect. Her warm and companionable book passes on details of how the modern German system gave her permission to be herself and to let her children be themselves, too.
I closed it feeling more relaxed and confident. While both my own kids were up a tree.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-5236595/Let-children-run-free-German-style.html#ixzz5CdTK6dGI
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Volk Heroes
This fun new book about how Germans raise their kids will break American parents’ hearts.
By REBECCA SCHUMAN
FEB 08, 20185:57 AM
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Typical German parents.
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photos by Thinkstock.
In a memorable scene of Sara Zaske’s guide to German-style parenting, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, Zaske sends her 4-year-old daughter Sophia to her Berlin preschool with a bathing suit in her bag. It turns out, however, that the suit is unnecessary: All the tykes at Sophia’s Kita frolic in the water-play area naked. Later that year, Sophia and the rest of her Kita class take part in a gleefully parent-free sleepover. A sleepover! At school! For a 4-year-old! These two snapshots of life as a modern German child—uninhibited nudity; jaw-dropping independence—neatly encapsulate precisely why Zaske’s book is in equal turns exhilarating and devastating to an American parent.
Zaske argues that thanks in large part to the anti-authoritarian attitudes of the postwar generation (the so-called “68ers”), contemporary German parents give their children a great deal of freedom—to do dangerous stuff; to go places alone; to make their own mistakes, most of which involve nudity, fire, or both. This freedom makes those kids better, happier, and ultimately less prone to turn into miserable sociopaths. “The biggest lesson I learned in Germany,” she writes, “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.” Yes, Zaske notes, we here in the ostensible land of the free could learn a thing or zwei from our friends in Merkel-world. It’s breathtaking to rethink so many American parenting assumptions in light of another culture’s way of doing things. But it’s devastating to consider just how unlikely it is that we’ll ever adopt any of these delightful German habits on a societal level.
This is not just because Americans pride ourselves on eschewing the advice of outsiders, though that certainly doesn’t help. Our political and social institutions are so firmly entrenched that no amount of wise Germanic advice can help us. “We’ve created a culture of control,” Zaske laments. “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.” It’s not just parents who are responsible for this, says Zaske, “it’s culture-wide,” from the “hours of homework” to the “intense” focus on competitive sports and extracurriculars; it’s also the “exaggerated media that makes it seem like a child can be abducted by a stranger at any time,” though stranger kidnappings in the United States are actually exceedingly rare. I mean, this is America, where the simple act of feeding an infant in public is enough to set off mommy warfare—allowing the entire nude body of a child in the out-of-doors is enough to warrant calling Child Protective Services or the cops.
Sara Zaske
Sara Zaske
Smeeta Mahanti
Achtung Baby is organized in roughly chronological order, beginning with Zaske’s arrival, toddler in tow, in the midst of a frigid German January for the start of her husband’s job in a small town outside of Berlin. The family eventually settles in the dynamic, child-adoring German capital, and although Zaske isn’t working full time, new friends encourage her to enroll Sophia in Kita; when she does, her crash course in German parenting begins in earnest, moving to the advanced level with the German-style midwife birth of her second child, Ozzie.
The chapters progress through Sophia’s Einschulung (AYN-shool-oong, or start of school) and the family’s eventual repatriation to the States, each brimming with examples—both anecdotal and research-based—of why the German approach, focused on childhood independence, is more humane and respectful than the prevailing American bourgeois ethos of sequestered play dates and recess-bereft schooldays.
Zaske’s vignettes—and especially the research that backs them up—also exemplify everything that is maddening about this particular era in the American parenting milieu. As with Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé, much of this consternation stems from the dramatic disparities in government support for parents. I mean, we can’t even secure emergency insurance for terminally ill children, much less subsidies for preschool—which in Germany are, of course, standard and generous.
Although Zaske does end every chapter with well-meaning suggestions for how American parents and governments (ha) might deutsch-ify their approaches, the book’s many eye-popping (but fun-sounding) stories—solo foot commutes for second-graders; intentionally dangerous “adventure playgrounds”; school-sanctioned fire play; and my personal favorite, a children’s park that consists solely of an unattended marble slab and chisel—just remind me of all the reasons my American compatriots will double down on their own car-clown garbage lifestyles. I found myself frustrated into tears while reading Achtung Baby, because the adoption of any German customs stateside would require nothing less than a full armed revolution.
For example, when Sophia starts first grade, school administrators remind parents that under no circumstances should they drop children off in an automobile. Could you imagine? I can’t. In the contemporary United States, even in larger cities (with New York being the only notable exception), school is so synonymous with the interminable “drop-off line” that its vicissitudes are the subject of bestselling mom-book rants.
In open defiance of this custom, I ride my daughter the 4½ miles to preschool on a bike—she gets pulled along the mean streets of St. Louis in a Burley trailer—only to get yelled at by moms in idling SUVs outside the school. A few weeks ago, all of us parents even got a sternly worded email from the director, chastising the few who do pick up their children on foot for blocking the valet-style “carpool line” with “pedestrian traffic.” This is unsurprising; most children in the U.S. do not walk to school, even if they live close enough to do so—to the detriment of their physical fitness, independence and joy, and of course also the environment. (Zaske experiences this culture shock in reverse when her family moves back to the U.S. and she makes the unheard-of suggestion of a solitary “walk to school day” at Sophia’s new San Francisco elementary.)
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This is America. We arrest mothers who let their kids go to the park alone; we restrict play to expensive registered classes and parent-present “dates”; our playgrounds, meanwhile, are lawsuit-proof and correspondingly stultifying—though who cares, when we have to drive our kids miles to the nearest park anyway? This is America, where we would sooner die than allow our 5-year-old to go naked in our front yard. This is America, where many parents of a certain demographic will surely enjoy Achtung Baby but probably ignore most of its best advice.
While well-intentioned liberal parents (aka this book’s audience) will find numerous aspects of the German style superior—and many of our own trends duly worrying—most of the substantial change Achtung Baby suggests requires a large-scale shift in both prevailing attitude and state funding, neither of which will be forthcoming in this country for the foreseeable future. There’s only so much one American parent can do—I and my sad little bike commute can certainly attest to that. And what’s more, there’s only so much one American parent, slammed with work and barely hanging on, will want to do. Achtung Baby is a great read, but it may leave the American reader feeling helpless rather than inspired—a sentiment all too common in, if you’ll pardon the expression, the current Zeitgeist.
—
Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children by Sara Zaske. Picador.