Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  The outdoors is a big focus for German vacations. While the beach is probably the most popular destination, many Germans go to the mountains or the countryside. Some Berliners even maintain small gardens with a one-room garden house that they rent or own. They go there on weekends to garden, barbecue, or just sit outside and enjoy the fresh air.

  We owned no such special garden, and while we made it to the beach many times, I feared that my children were growing up as hopeless city kids. Sophia even once asked me what a lawnmower was, a natural question since we didn’t have a lawn. However, it made me realize my children were experiencing a vastly different childhood than the one I had in the green suburbs of New York, or that of my husband whose memories are full of stories of camping in the wilds of California. My kids, I thought, were growing up more like building-bound New York City kids. Even with all the value on getting outside, I didn’t think they would develop a deep love for nature in the middle of a huge urban place like Berlin.

  Taking Away the Toys

  Our normally democratic kita did push one project on the children that they would never choose, and it was a doozy: toy-free time. For three months, they took away all the toys. No more blocks, cars, and dolls. No puzzles or board games. No more dress-up clothes. Even the garden toys were put away—the scooters and tricycles, the shovels and buckets. All gone. It sounded like a punishment, but I was assured that it wasn’t.

  “It pushes them to use their imagination,” Annika told me. “They have to use normal, everyday things around them to play with.” The kids did make up games out of whatever they could find: lined-up chairs became a train. The nap-time blankets and tables became forts. They played house and pretended they were animals, all without the aid of any kind of toys. The children were also allowed to use what they found outside in the garden—chestnuts and small stones for coins to play store, sticks to build houses or use as pirate swords. Despite all this great creativity, they did become bored. Very bored.

  “It’s good for children to be bored sometimes,” Annika told me.

  When I first encountered the toy-free project idea, I thought it was an effort to battle consumerism. Already our kita seemed to discourage the “branded” and electronic toys that child development experts say can inhibit children’s imaginative play. At our kita, there were no Star Wars figures or Disney characters—and no toys that beeped or sang at the push of a button. Instead the kita featured open-ended toys like blocks, generic cars, and small plastic animals. Toy-free time, I thought, was taking this ethos a step further, but I was wrong again. The toys themselves had little to do with the philosophy behind the project.

  Toy-free time is a project aimed at preventing addiction. First developed in a Bavarian district in 1992, the toy-free kindergarten project is built on the premise that habit-forming behaviors start early. Children use toys sometimes to cover up “unsatisfied needs and frustrations.” It is meant to be temporary. The teachers remove the toys for a short period of time and do not tell the children what to play instead. (Our kita already took a kid-directed approach to most things, so this part wasn’t a new idea.) Taking away these external cues for play forces the children to rely on their own internal creativity and on each other.

  The project received an expert evaluation in 1996 by a German social scientist, Anna Winner, who found that toy-free time helped the children get in better touch with their own needs, enhanced their creativity, built self-confidence, improved their communications with one another, and, perhaps most important, improved their ability to handle frustration. Following Winner’s study, the youth nonprofit Aktion Jugendschutz published free instructional materials on its website, and hundreds of kitas and kindergartens throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Austria have implemented it.

  At our international kita, toy-free time received mixed reviews. The first year Sophia was at this kita, the project was discussed at length with the parents, and everyone liked how it went. But the following year, the project landed at the end of a particularly long, gray winter, and some parents rebelled. They said their kids were so bored they didn’t want to come to kita. Others reported that their children would come home and play madly with their toys in the evening. Sophia did this too, and I have to admit, it didn’t seem healthy. The critics were so loud that the project was suspended the following year. Then it came back in a modified form just in time for Ozzie to experience it in the big kids’ group.

  After much discussion, the kita teachers and parents reached a very German compromise. Their solution: send the kids outside more. It fit with the traditional value of getting fresh air every day while still falling within the limits of the toy-free program—nature had no ready-made toys. The children had to use their imagination. As part of the compromise, the toy-free period was reduced from three months to six weeks and moved to the spring so that the extra outside time would be more pleasant. Even better, the kita teachers added field trips to the mix. Once a week, they would take the children into the Wald (“forest”).

  On the edges of Berlin, both inside the city borders and out are several large forests, all accessible by a short train ride. Toy-free time at our kita now seemed a bit like waldkitas, day-care centers that are literally located in forests and whose whole curriculum is focused on natural exploration. This type of kita also has few if any manufactured toys. (Waldkitas shouldn’t be confused with the Waldorf schools, which were first developed in Germany by Rudolf Steiner and named after the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette company where Steiner opened his first school for children of company employees.)

  At three, Ozzie had graduated from the toddler group and was now in the mixed-age group where Annika was the head teacher. He was excited to be with the big kids. As time went on, though, he started to have other worries. He told me he had no friends. When I asked his teachers about this, they reported to me the names of all the children he played with regularly, a group that included children younger and older, so what he said was not exactly true. What he seemed most concerned about was that he didn’t have one single, close friend who played with him all the time, someone who paid attention to him like his sister, Sophia, did.

  Ozzie had a bit of the second-child syndrome. At home, he played with his sister for hours. He was rarely alone, and Sophia, who is three years older, directed a lot of their play, so much so that if she wasn’t around or wasn’t interested in playing with him, he was at loose ends. I knew the minute this happened because he would be at my elbow. “Mom, what should I play? I don’t know what I should do,” he’d say.

  I was still a parenting-book aficionado. I knew that I shouldn’t always tell him what to play, that I should encourage him to come up with his own ideas. Sometimes I would turn the question back to him. “What do you want to play?” Or I’d try to point him in the right direction: “Why don’t you go look in your room and see what you can find?” And it worked, for about ten minutes, and then he would be back again.

  Of course, I’d occasionally pull out a puzzle or a game and play with him. It was nice together time, but I knew he needed to figure out how to play by himself. I didn’t think he would learn that at kita with so many kids around, but that’s how it happened with a little help from the modified toy-free time.

  Ozzie did not like having no toys at kita. He joined the chorus of complaining kids for a while before the outdoors grabbed him. He spent most of his day in the kita’s garden, gathering snail shells, chestnuts, acorns, and piles of rocks (each of these was “special,” he told me). He and another boy counted red and black beetles that they called “fire bugs.” They went on a hunt for the fox that supposedly visited the kita sometimes. I thought this was a made-up story, considering our urban kita was right next to the S-Bahn tracks, until I actually saw it one day.

  By far, the forest trips were the high point of every week for Ozzie. He would remind me days ahead of time to help him pack his backpack. When he returned, he’d tell me it was “Great!” but like a typical kid, he’d provide few det
ails:

  Me: “What did you do on the trip?”

  Ozzie: “We walked around.”

  Me: “Did you see anything interesting?”

  Ozzie: “Bugs.”

  Me: “And?”

  Ozzie: “There was lots of mud. I found some sticks. And rocks.”

  Then he would show me his latest collection taken straight out of his pockets.

  It didn’t seem like these were life-changing experiences, at least at first. On our weekend family excursions, we’d visited a few of Berlin’s forests, including Grunewald in the west and Plänterwald, a few train stops to the south. The kids enjoyed these trips—to a point. After some time, they’d start complaining that they were tired or hungry, and we would end up turning back without having hiked very far.

  When Ozzie visited a forest we hadn’t been to before with his kita, he insisted the whole family had to see “Bucher wald” because “it was a really good forest for exploring!” One weekend, we did just that. He was so proud to take us to his forest. I was impressed by how long a walk it was from the train station to the forest. There wasn’t one complaint from him on the whole walk. In fact, he was quiet.

  Once we got into Bucher wald, he couldn’t remember exactly where he had been with his class. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go, so we walked around and looked at what we found on the forest floor. We found bugs, funny-looking mushrooms, lots of sticks, and plenty of mud. Bucher wald was large and far enough from the busy streets that once in the woods almost all outside sound faded away. It was easy to feel like we weren’t near a city but deep in the wilds somewhere. I think that’s what he liked.

  Some weeks later, well after the toy-free project had ended, I showed up at kita on a drizzly day. All the kids were playing inside, except my son.

  “Where’s Ozzie?” I asked Annika. She pointed out the back windows. There he was in the garden with his raincoat on, all by himself.

  “He does this quite often now,” Annika said. “He’ll go outside even when no one else wants to. He’ll stay out there for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, then come back in.”

  “What does he do?” I asked, joining Annika at the windows. Ozzie had a stick in his hand, and as I watched he squatted down and dug at something on the ground with his stick.

  “He wanders around, looking at things,” Annika said. “I think it’s pretty cool.”

  “Me too,” I said. I was amazed at how comfortable he was with being alone. It was clear that the extra time in nature had changed something for him. Somehow, in the forests near Berlin, Ozzie had found peace with himself.

  8

  The Freedom to Move

  We bought Ozzie his first bicycle when he was four. It was small, but it was the real thing, a full-on pedal bike. Plenty of these tiny bikes can be found in Berlin, and many kids as young as three learn to ride. At four, Ozzie was among the last of his friends at kita to learn to ride, but it didn’t take him long to learn—less than a minute in fact.

  The day after we bought the bike, Ozzie couldn’t wait to try it out. Zac and Sophia were going to a friend’s birthday party, so I took Ozzie out by myself to practice. I figured Zac wouldn’t miss much because Ozzie probably wouldn’t get it right away. We went to “tire park,” which in addition to tire swings had a large grassy area with a nice, paved circular trail perfect for a new bike rider. As I pushed him, Ozzie started pedaling and singing some nonsense song to himself, which sounded like “blah, la, do, do.” I held on to the seat for about ten seconds before he pulled away and was pedaling on his own, blah-la-do-do-ing the whole time. He also rode all the way back home without falling once.

  Ozzie found it easy because he had already been on two wheels for a couple of years. When he was two, his kita teachers expressed some concern about his coordination. He often ran into things and other children. I thought he simply didn’t pay attention enough to where he was going, but our pediatrician suggested he try a laufrad—a walking bike (sometimes referred to as a balance bike in the United States). A laufrad has no pedals. Ozzie soon got the hang of it using his feet to make the bike move. His coordination improved so much that he left me far behind, and I ended up chasing that so-called walking bike many times through the sidewalks of Berlin.

  Once Ozzie picked up both legs and flew down the hill near our house. I yelled, “Stop! Achtung! Ozzie!” None of it slowed his speed. I felt so helpless running behind him. I could do nothing to stop him from flying right out into the street. Only he did it himself, making this neat little turn at the corner and looking back up at me to see what all the shrieking was about. Eventually, I learned to do as many German parents do: give him rules about stopping at corners, then let him ride.

  So when it came time to ride a real pedal bike, he was ready to take off. On a laufrad, a toddler learns not only how to balance a bike but also the rules of the road (or the sidewalk) before moving up to a faster pedal bike. It’s a process of preparation, increased responsibility, and, for the parents, letting go.

  I saw this same process underway all the time in Berlin. While walking to kita, we’d often run across tiny tots on two wheels seemingly by themselves. They were blocks ahead of their parents. One afternoon as I was walking to a birthday party with some other mothers, all of our kids started racing each other on foot far ahead toward a busy street corner. I was the only one nervous enough to chase after them and yell at them to slow down. “Oh, they know when to stop,” my friend Susan assured me. Sure enough the kids finished their race well before the street corner and looked back. Susan smiled and waved them on.

  This was just the start. I didn’t realize that once Sophia entered first grade I was expected to teach her how to walk or bike there all by herself, even without me trailing a block behind. Before the first day, we received a pamphlet in the mail with a host of information about starting school. It also included a request that parents not drive their children to school. They should start learning the way on foot so that eventually they could go by themselves.

  I decided that this did not apply to us. After all, we were Americans! I walked Sophia to school all through first grade—along with most German parents. In second grade, most of Sophia’s friends started to walk on their own. By third grade, they were all on their own. Still, I held out.

  The school was about 600 yards from our house, just up the street, but still, we were in a big city! She was only eight! She could get hit by a car or some crazy person could carry her off. I knew, intellectually, this last scenario was highly unlikely, but this fear loomed large in my mind. It didn’t help that on one corner of the street, some seedy-looking characters gathered to drink in the afternoons.

  “There’s too much construction,” I told Sophia. “The cars drive too fast. You’re too dreamy when you’re walking.”

  She didn’t buy any of it. “All my friends walk to school by themselves,” she said. “And they’re fine.”

  It was true. Her friend Maya lived much farther away than we did, and at the age of eight, she rode her bike through crowded sidewalks and crossed busy intersections all by herself. She wasn’t the only one. Every morning, hordes of children filled our neighborhood walking and biking to school without any attending adults. In the afternoons, they were there again walking home. They filled the playgrounds. They went in and out of the bakeries and stores with only other children for company.

  German children learn how to navigate the streets from their parents and teachers. Along with math, reading, and all the other subjects, Berlin primary schools have a specific curriculum for “traffic and mobility education.” Near the end of her first year, Sophia spent time learning traffic signs and rules of the road. Her teacher also took the entire class out for a walking tour of the neighborhood, showing them firsthand how the traffic moved, what the signs meant, and how to use crosswalks, or zebrastreifen (“zebra stripes”), as they’re called in Germany. The parents back this up by walking and biking the route to school with their children for several mon
ths to an entire year before letting their kids try it on their own.

  I had always thought I was a fairly relaxed parent, but I was starting to feel like maybe I was too overprotective. I knew it wasn’t just me. It was my entire culture. While I was arguing with Sophia about letting her walk by herself, I was also reading about parents in the United States being arrested for doing that very thing. The most famous of these was the case of Danielle and Alexander Meitiv of Silver Spring, Maryland, who let their two children, ages ten and six at the time, walk home, about a mile, from a park alone. A concerned citizen called the police and the Meitivs wound up charged with “unsubstantiated child neglect”—a charge that was later dropped.

  While this case gained the most media attention, there are plenty of other examples: a woman in Connecticut was arrested when she overslept and her stepson took it upon himself to walk the two miles to school. A mother in Florida was arrested for letting her seven-year-old walk to a park alone. In South Carolina, a mother trusted her nine-year-old nephew to walk her three-year-old son less than a quarter of a mile to McDonald’s, and she was arrested. In any one of these cases, the parents’ judgment could be disputed: perhaps two miles is too far for a child to walk or maybe nine isn’t old enough to watch a toddler, but the reaction of the authorities in several different states made it clear that our culture had a strong stance against letting any grade-school child out in public without adult supervision. I also knew that most Germans wouldn’t even think to call the polizei for any of these situations.

  The Meitiv case probably earned the most scrutiny because they were deliberately letting their children out alone. They were “free-range” parents. That’s the first time I’d heard the term, which had been coined by Lenore Skenazy, the so-called world’s worst mom. In 2008, Skenazy, then a columnist for The New York Sun, let her nine-year-old son, Izzy, take the New York subway home by himself. He’d asked to try to see if he could find his way home on the subway, so she left him by the Bloomingdale’s stop one sunny day, gave him a map and some money, and went the other direction. “Sure enough, he got home, and he felt very proud,” Skenazy said. “I didn’t write about it right away because it wasn’t a publicity stunt, and to my mind it wasn’t that big a deal.… If I’d thought it was dangerous, I would have said no.”