by Sara Zaske
German women feel these pressures too, but the country has more ways to counteract both the old and new myths around motherhood. For one thing, they have access to consultants like Cathrin, who are trained to work with families as individual cases, each needing unique solutions and not blanket cure-all philosophies (and whose services are covered by health insurance). But many other German social customs and policies actively support a more tempered idea of motherhood than the be-all, end-all caregiver for children. One of my personal favorites I call “men pushing prams.”
On any given day in Berlin, I would see an unusual sight: men, young and old, pushing strollers with their infant children, by themselves, without their wives, in the middle of the day. They were also at the kindercafés (coffee shops made for parents with children), in the grocery stores, and at the playgrounds: all the places where you might expect to see only mothers. At first I thought it was because they were unemployed, but I soon learned that I was witnessing the effect of a generous paternity leave policy.
In Germany, both parents can take partially paid elternzeit (“parent time”) for up to three years and still return to their position. A great many parents of both genders take advantage of this. Still, with the attendant old pressures and traditional roles, more women take time off and for longer periods—typically a year—than fathers do. Nationwide, 96 percent of mothers took advantage of the leave policy, while only an average of 34 percent of German fathers took parental leave in 2016—though in one city, Jena, 57 percent of fathers took leave, according to the Federal Statistics Office. Most of the men took just three months. Still, three months of paid leave is exactly three months more than most American fathers get.
The idea behind paternal leave is equity: men should be allowed time to be parents just as women are, and if more men take time off for their children, fewer women of childbearing age will face discrimination in the workplace. It is not a perfect policy by any means. I’ve heard tales of young women being suspiciously passed over for jobs, and both fathers and mothers can be reluctant to take the time off because of the potential damage it could do to their careers.
However, if used, the policy yields some great benefits for the child. Maternity leave means young infants get more close time with their moms early on, when many women feel that babies need their attention the most. And by encouraging fathers to take some time off, more children get to know their father as a primary caregiver for some period of time. (It’s interesting to note how little time is spent in popular attachment literature on the importance of infants bonding with their fathers.)
This leave system gives working families more options for caring for young children. German mothers have some time at home, without the financial stress of losing their income entirely. When mothers are ready to go back to work, they have several choices for caregivers, including the father of their child. Professional child care in many forms is another option and it is heavily subsidized in many places by the government. When I was in Berlin, we paid about €100 (about $112) a month to send my daughter to half-day care; in the United States we’d paid more than $800 a month and could only take a $3,000 tax credit on that total bill for the entire year. Working parents can hire a tagesmutter (a “day mother”) to help care for a young child in their home. Alternatively, they can join a kinderladen (usually a smaller day care run by parents), but one of the most popular choices is a more institutional type of day care like kita.
When I look back on those exhausting first years with my son, I have a lingering sense of failure. Not because I wasn’t there for him—I was, constantly. Ironically, it’s because I was there for him all the time that I failed. I was trying too hard, and I lost perspective. How much easier would it have been if I’d set more gentle boundaries earlier with Ozzie? If I’d put more limits on our nighttime routine, wouldn’t we all have slept and felt better? I was tired for nearly two years. I’m sure it affected everything and everyone around me. That’s a heavy cost.
Yet motherhood in modern times is doomed to feel like failure. Both traditional ideals and the ones now being pushed by attachment or natural parenting, as well as other rigid philosophies, are not realistically attainable, and, more important, may not be worth striving for in the first place. A strong bond between mother and child is wonderful, but it’s not everything, not even close. It’s good for mothers to ask for outside help, not just for their own sanity, but for the sake of their children. Because as I learned the hard way, they need more than just one person can possibly give them.
4
Small Children, Small Worries (Kleine Kinder, Kleine Sorgen)
I was sitting in a chair that was way too small for me, my knees almost to my chest as I tried to hold my squirming little boy in my lap. It was the first day of orientation for Ozzie’s “toddler” class at our new international kita. It was a hot summer day, and my son was eager to get down and crawl around the classroom. Self-conscious, I looked at the other parents around me, mostly mothers, whose children all looked older than mine. I was relieved to see at least two other “crawlers.”
As we waited for the meeting to start, I tried to strike up a conversation with the British woman next to me who had a beautiful, well-behaved little girl on her lap. “How old is she?” I asked.
“Almost two,” she replied. I realized too late the trap I’d laid for myself. “And how old is yours?” she asked.
“Eleven months,” I replied.
“He’s awfully young, isn’t he?” she said.
“My daughter went into child care at four months,” I said. She looked shocked. “I’m from the States,” I quickly explained. “We only get three months of maternity leave.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” she said.
I had to agree. Whenever I tell any European that the United States has no paid parental leave, I would get the same reaction. I had taken advantage of our time in Germany and stayed an entire year with my son. After the juggling act I’d done when Sophia was a baby, being home with Ozzie felt almost indulgent. I say almost because with a baby at home and a three-year-old in preschool for a half day, I didn’t have much time for anything outside of mothering. I was supposed to be working on my writing, per our original plan, but I was exhausted. I had managed to use the hours spent nursing and rocking a baby back to sleep to imagine a whole novel. As of yet, though, I hadn’t had the time to get it out of my head and onto paper. So when Ozzie neared the one-year mark, I was more than ready to put him into kita for a few hours a day.
By luck and persistence, I’d managed to find two spots open at a much-sought-after public “international” kita in the fashionable Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, a few train stops to the north of our own neighborhood. Sophia’s first kita in Treptow had been a good place, but she was still having some language troubles. We’d learned she had been trying out her own brand of American foreign diplomacy: first, she would negotiate, in English, with another child about why it was her turn with a particular toy; then when the confused German-speaking child refused to give it up, she would resort to the use of force. It wasn’t all the time, but it’s never fun to hear that your normally sweet young daughter is hitting other children. We worked with Sophia on the problem, and her behavior improved.
Yet, when an opening came at an international kita that was filled with other children who spoke both German and English, we jumped at the opportunity. At the new kita, they still prescribed only immersion to help her learn German, but there were many more English-speaking children at this kita. Each class had one teacher who spoke only English and another who spoke only German. Luckily, they also had a spot for Ozzie in a toddler room, which was specifically reserved for children ages one to three. Sophia, who was now four, would be nearby, down the hall, in a group for older kids, hopefully learning how to get along better with others.
Ozzie’s future kita teachers explained how the process of “settling in” to the toddler room would work. For a period that could last as long as
six weeks, one parent stayed with their child at the kita. So at first, I went to kita with Ozzie and was in the room the whole time he was there; then, a few days later, I would leave the room for a few minutes, then longer and longer, until eventually I would leave him there and not come back until the afternoon. The idea was that he would become more comfortable with the new environment and his caregivers, as well as with the idea of Mama leaving and returning. In effect, we were making Ainsworth’s “strange situation” less strange.
Sitting in the toddler playroom for several weeks, I met some of the other parents—mostly mothers. About half were from English-speaking countries and half were German. We all talked about our children, and how well they were adjusting to kita. We also spoke about our own desire to go back to work and have some time to ourselves. In these conversations one thing struck me over and over about the German mothers in particular: they had almost no guilt about putting their young children into child care. “I think it’s really good for her to be around the other kids,” one mother told me. “She’ll learn from them.” I heard this sentiment often, especially from parents who had only one child and thought their child really needed more interaction with other kids. In Germany, the single-child family is quite common, but even parents who had more than one child said it would be good for their younger children to play without their older siblings around. One mother pointed out how nice it was for her daughter to have a new space outside of their apartment to explore and make her own.
These comments were vastly different from the attitudes of the mothers I knew in the United States, including myself. If anything, we American moms spoke of putting our babies and young children in child care with regret: it was a necessary evil, something we had to do because we had to work. I learned later that the positive attitude toward child care I heard in Berlin is not found all over Germany, either. It’s more common among Germans who live in the eastern half of the country. A study published in International Journal of Adolescence and Youth in 2012, more than two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, found that young Germans who lived in the East still had a more positive view of child care than those in the West. They also favored starting their children earlier and having them stay longer in child care. Heidi Keller, one of the authors of the study, told me that the wider use of child care in the former communist GDR was behind the different attitudes. “In the early day-care system, there’s much broader coverage [in the East],” she said. “It’s much more familiar for people to bring their children to school early, and it was part of their upbringing in GDR.”
The Kindergarten East-West Legacy
The development of kindergarten has had a troubled history in its home country. The way young children were educated was often at the mercy of various political storms that shook Germany, as history professor Ann Taylor Allen pointed out in a chapter for the anthology Kindergartens and Cultures. Probably the most obvious disruption was the Nazi party, which rejected Fröbel’s kindergarten concept as weak, and instead worked for early education that raised a “hardened generation—strong, reliable, obedient and decent,” according to a brochure on how to run a Nazi kindergarten written by Richard Benzing in 1941.
After the war, West Germany pushed a family model similar to the 1950s American family: with the father as the sole breadwinner and the mother at home with the children. This meant there were fewer kindergartens since most children remained home. Then came the 1968 generation, which pushed for change on a number of fronts, including women’s ability to work. A group of mothers in West Berlin started their own child-care centers called kinderläden. This model spread and some antiauthoritarian proponents began creating kinderläden with few rules—their philosophy was that children could best raise themselves. These new spaces and feminist activism helped increase the number of kids in child care in the West, but kindergarten enrollment was not near the level in the East.
After the war, the communist East German government rolled out an aggressive expansion of kindergartens, as Allen documents. By 1962, more than half of the young children in East Germany were in kindergartens. By 1988, that number had risen to 81 percent. This corresponded to a high rate of women in the workforce; at that time, a full 91 percent of East German women were employed.
While the GDR kindergartens in the East were run with a clear political agenda, there was an interesting side effect to this aggressive expansion, which I experienced on the east side of Berlin more than twenty years after the fall of the Wall: many Berlin mothers took returning to work and enrolling their child in care as completely normal. Their mothers had done it, and in some cases, so had their grandmothers. If I had entered my children in a kita a few miles to the west in the same city, I might have experienced a different attitude. One fellow American expat, Anna, lived in Charlottenberg, an expensive southwestern district of Berlin, when her children were born, and found herself surrounded by mothers who had abandoned their high-flying careers as lawyers and businesswomen just to stay at home longer with their children. I had a hard time believing her because it didn’t sound like the Berlin I knew.
Still, in general, child care is now considered a right in Germany. Since 2013, every German child from ages one to six is guaranteed a spot at a child-care center, and the city of Berlin has been making steady moves toward making it free at every age. Today, about 59 percent of two-year-olds are enrolled in some form of early childhood education, and among older children, preprimary education is nearly universal with children ages three, four, and five enrolled at 92 percent, 96 percent, and 98 percent, respectively, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Far fewer children in the United States are in any kind of early childhood education, with only 23.4 percent of children under five in formal child care, according to the Center for American Progress. The high cost of care is most likely the main deterrent, but I also think the lingering stigma around child care discourages many parents from enrolling their children if they don’t have to. Even if they do, they try to limit the hours, like I did.
In the United States, the entrenched ideal is still the stay-at-home mom. Despite the fact that 71 percent of mothers are now working outside the home, the majority of Americans still think it’s best when one parent stays at home full-time, according to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center. Given how few of those full-time parents are men (only 16 percent), the pressure remains on mothers to be stay-at-home moms, a term that has notably changed from the housewife of the ’50s and ’60s, increasing the emphasis on motherhood as a woman’s highest priority. Whatever it is called, this occupation has declined considerably since 1970, when nearly half of mothers in two-parent families worked only in the home. For both my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations, the baby boomers and post–World War II generation, women were expected not only to maintain the household but be available for their children until they graduated from high school. In their view, leaving a baby, even a toddler, in the care of anyone else was heartless.
“I just don’t know how you can stand to leave this beautiful child!” my otherwise supportive mother exclaimed to me once when Sophia was eighteen months old.
The weight of her judgment was like a body blow. “It’s not like I have much choice, Mom,” I told her.
But in Germany, I did have a choice. I could have applied for elterngeld (money for parental leave) and taken a longer time off to stay home with my second child, but after having a whole year off with Ozzie, I knew that having a few hours to do something other than care for a child would be better for me and, therefore, better for my son. Still, it felt selfish. Hearing the other Berlin mothers express such positive attitudes toward kita helped alleviate some of the guilt. I certainly liked the idea that other kids and the new experiences at kita might be good for Ozzie.
I was also getting the best of both the East and West because I was surrounded by parents and teachers who had the East German perspective of kita as a normal, positive experience for
young children and who had also adopted the West’s more open curriculum, which rejected political or authoritarian rules in favor of child-centered play and social skills.
When I asked the history professor Allen about the differences she saw in today’s American and German systems, she said that Americans see kindergarten as an academic class, while Germans see it primarily as child care. That could explain why Berliners often used the words kita and kindergarten interchangeably, even though kita often includes children younger than three. For those young kids like Ozzie, kita was essentially child care, but that didn’t mean there was no learning going on. It just wasn’t academic learning.
Early Kita Skills
Learning at kita for a one-year-old like Ozzie meant mastering “gross motor skills,” like walking, or “fine motor skills,” like using forks and spoons. None of it was purposely done through training or structured activities. Ozzie learned through play. He also picked up the language this way, without any formal instruction. Like his sister, Ozzie’s first German words were the key ones for toddler relations: meine and nein. On the friendlier side, he also learned to say hallo before he could say the English version, hello.
To keep track of what he learned, Ozzie was given a long, bright green binder (Germans, I was starting to notice, love binders). In this binder, the kita teachers collected his drawings, and made observations on his behavior. They often wrote down direct quotations from him, his first words, and, then later, his more chatty thoughts, including his likes and dislikes, such as this gem about nap time: “I like it loud, when I have to go to bed. Then I like to jump around and giggle with my friends in our beds.” Apparently, getting Ozzie to sleep was difficult for his kita teachers as well.
The teachers kept track of Ozzie’s development, noting developmental milestones. For instance, I received a sheet that described Ozzie’s “competencies.” For example, “ego competencies” were about things like developing confidence in his ability to make things happen, and “social competencies” looked at his ability to be part of a group and play alongside others. There were also categories for knowledge and learning, but these were accomplishments like “communicating one’s own wishes and intentions to others” and “developing the patience to repeat an exercise”—not academic skills. The kita instructors scheduled meetings with the parents to discuss progress and any issues. It was soon clear to me that kita was much more than babysitting.