Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  Sex is an open secret in American culture. Kids see signs of it everywhere—in advertisements, on billboards, in magazines, on TV, in movies, in the lyrics of pop songs, and in a million jokes. Today’s children also have the Internet, which makes it even more likely they will see or read false, misleading, or disturbing information about sex. Yet it’s still difficult for American kids to get an honest, unbiased discussion of sex in school—and ignorance can have disastrous consequences.

  Sex education in the United States has been divided between two approaches: comprehensive sexual education, which strives to provide information on anatomy, puberty, contraception, sexual orientation, and sexual health, in addition to the basic facts of how a baby is conceived; and abstinence-only education, which has a primary focus on discouraging sex before marriage and leaves out almost all of the other topics. Until recently, the federal government continued to fund abstinence-only education, to the tune of $1.5 billion over twenty-five years, despite the fact that no evidence exists that such programs have any impact on teen sexual activity.

  This has meant that fewer than half of U.S. high schools cover all of the topics that the CDC has identified as critical to ensuring sexual health, and only 20 percent of middle schools address them. In 2016, fewer than half the U.S. states required public schools to teach sexual education, and thirty-five states allowed parents to opt their children out of the courses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

  In contrast, comprehensive sex education is considered a right in Germany. The way sex ed is taught still varies from state to state, and parents must be informed by the school about what is being taught, but no parent can opt their children out of sex education, not even for religious reasons. Many Americans might object to that loss of parental power, but it’s hard to argue with the results the German approach achieves. In comparison, the German teenage birth rate is three and a half times lower than it is in the United States; the abortion rate is about four and a half times lower; and the HIV prevalence rate is three and a half times lower, according to figures compiled by Planned Parenthood.

  Germans also do not wait until high school or even middle school to introduce the topic. “Sex education cannot begin early enough,” said Dr. Heike Kramer in an article on the city of Berlin’s official website. Kramer said that children need a cushion of information well before puberty, with its attendant hormones and mood swings, overwhelms them. Many American programs start in fifth grade or later. That’s much too late by Kramer’s standards, especially considering that doctors now place the average start of puberty around age ten or eleven, and many fifth graders are already in the midst of it.

  In Berlin, sex education usually begins in first and second grades with basic biology, body differences, and sex abuse prevention. My children had some education even earlier than that in kita, including setting boundaries around touching, which was meant to help protect them from abuse, and learning the differences between male and female bodies—although in kita to learn about body differences, all they had to do was look around them. Kita bathrooms have no stalls, just rows of toilets in an open room with no door. I was taken aback by this at first, but it soon made a lot of sense. The children are safer when there’s no door that can be locked and where something secretive could happen. And children that age don’t really care who sees them on the toilet.

  We adults sometimes forget that body shame is learned, not something we’re born with. The rows of toilets in the kita also meant there was rarely a wait in case they had to pee, and they all saw each other’s naked bodies regularly. In America, long before we went to Germany, I once changed my infant daughter’s diaper in front of a young cousin who had grown up with only brothers. He gasped and asked me worriedly, “Where’s her penis?” This was funny at the time, but in retrospect, it reveals how American modesty is somewhat problematic. Our children can grow to be five, six, or even older before ever understanding the basic biological differences between the sexes.

  Once German children start school, more formal sex education begins. The Berlin Department of Education, Youth, and Science provides only a general framework of what students should be taught about sex, but its goals are ambitious: schools should convey a “comprehensive, holistic, and personal concept of human sexuality.” Kids should be taught about sexuality as “a force that affects human beings physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially throughout every stage of life.”

  In practical terms, this means German kids learn much more about sex than conception. They talk about things like body image and gender stereotypes. They learn about preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and about the pleasure of sex, including masturbation and orgasms. They are also taught about homosexuality. The Berlin guidelines emphasize that teachers should respect cultural and religious differences and take a neutral stance toward sexual issues, not impose their own opinions or morals on the students. I have to wonder if this is truly possible given the difficulty of the topic.

  Sex education is not without controversy in Germany, but as with a lot of things, the debate is in a whole other place than it is in America. German parents are more concerned with how sex ed is taught rather than keeping information out entirely. For instance, in 2011 materials that were much more explicit than Mummy Laid an Egg were pulled from the Berlin primary schools after parents’ objections. Yet few people in Germany would call for a morality-laden “abstinence-only” approach the way it has been taught in the United States.

  Regardless of your beliefs around sex, I think there’s a strong case for American parents to start pressuring our legislators for German-style comprehensive sexual education in schools. Why? Because by age seventeen, the vast majority of American teens will have had sex. Religious prohibition does not necessarily prevent young people from engaging in sex. According to a 2009 study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 80 percent of evangelical young adults have had premarital sex. The fact is the majority of young people are sexually active, and they need good information to protect their health and prevent unwanted pregnancies.

  If our school districts won’t provide this education, we owe it to our children to help them find good sources of information, in addition to ourselves, because quite frankly children and young people don’t want to discuss some of these topics with their parents. Did you? Outside of school, we can guide our children to ask questions of trusted health-care providers and nonprofits. We can also give them good books, movies, and appropriate sources on the Internet that let them learn by themselves without us even having to be there.

  I know culturally America is a bit prudish compared to Germany. It’s part of our Puritan heritage, but the urge to keep our children “innocent” is not just impossible, it’s dangerous. Our children will eventually grow into adults and they have a right to know about their own bodies. When I told Sophia that many parents in America would be angry that a school had taught their first grade children about sex, her response was to the point: “Well, somebody has to tell us some time!”

  Death

  Sophia was always one for asking the hard questions, and at age four, she hit me with this one:

  “Do I have to die?” she asked.

  How did this come up? I thought, as I struggled to formulate an answer. Somehow Sophia had suddenly realized that death is permanent. (Young children usually have trouble recognizing that death and sleep are different.) This bomb of a question was possibly one of the toughest moments Zac and I had ever faced as parents. Long ago, we had decided that we would be as honest as possible with our children when they asked difficult questions. What we didn’t realize is how much trouble honesty can get you into.

  “Everybody dies,” I said. “But most likely you won’t die until you are very, very old. Older than your grandmother.” This was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes grew wide.

  “Grandma is going to die?”

  “Not right now,” I said. “But, yes, eventua
lly she will die. Everyone dies, Sophia.”

  “Will you die?” she asked.

  “Yes, but hopefully not for a long time.”

  “What happens after someone dies?”

  I took a deep breath. “Nobody knows for sure,” I said. “Some people believe that there’s a heaven, a place where your spirit goes. It’s a happy place where you can be with all the other people who died.”

  Despite this rosy picture of the afterlife, she obviously didn’t think it was good enough. “I don’t want to die,” she repeated, her eyes filling up with tears.

  “Nobody does, honey. Nobody does,” I said and hugged her, still feeling that somehow I had let her down.

  She repeated a version of this conversation with Zac and me for a couple weeks, and no matter what religious explanations we proffered about what might happen after people die, she was not comforted. Oddly enough, she finally calmed down after Zac gave the biological explanation of what happens to a dead body. Ever the scientist, Zac carefully explained the process in which the body is broken down by decomposers like worms, insects, and bacteria, and then becomes part of the earth, and eventually all the atoms and molecules that once made up your body become part of the world, the dirt, the water, the plants, and the air. Sophia asked him to repeat this story several times. At four, she seemed to like this idea a lot, even though it said nothing about what happened to her spirit. I think in her mind she imagined that to be happening not just to her body but also to her “self,” which is a rather poetic way of thinking about death.

  Then as things often do with kids, she dropped the subject. In second grade, it popped up again. Sophia came home with a video link she was excited to show me. She had me look it up on the website for RBB (which is like the German version of a local PBS station): it was a cartoon showing two children on a roller coaster. As we watched, a child’s voice explained that bad times come in life, people get sick or have accidents, but in the end, we all die. The cartoon kids grew older, until their heads hung to the side. Crosses replaced their eyes, and their tongues hung out in classic cartoon death. Then two springs ejected them from the roller coaster ride. I looked at my daughter in horror. Sophia just smiled.

  “Watch! This is the really funny part!” Sophia said. The roller coaster cart was now filled with an array of animals and plants, who as they traveled all soon had crosses for eyes too and then were ejected by springs. It was a simple, clear message, and one of the hardest truths I had told her at age four: everything that lives must die. Only this time Sophia seemed to take it in stride.

  The public broadcasting station first ran this cartoon called Leben mit dem Tod (“Living With Death”) as a “subject week” in 2012, encouraging schools to view the videos and participate in related activities. Not all schools adopted it like ours did. It was an optional activity, though German psychologist Christoph Student thinks it shouldn’t be. While the subject of death is often taught in religion classes, Student thinks that’s too little, too late and argues that death should be taught with the openness of sexual education in German schools. “Adults want to protect children from fear. But that’s nonsense—keeping children away from death is like keeping them away from life,” Student said in an interview with RBB.

  This doesn’t mean that parents should sit down with their toddler and have a “death talk”; Student advises that parents should respond to children’s questions about death with “What do you think?” and let the child’s own beliefs stand. They should only correct them if they have destructive ideas. And there will be plenty of opportunities to talk about death, Student points out, as children see pets and other animals die and, of course, sometimes their own relatives.

  As part of the death project, the children in Sophia’s class were asked to draw pictures of someone they knew who had died. A lot of her classmates drew pictures of their grandfathers. One showed an uncle going to the hospital. Sophia drew a picture of her fish. At that age, she’d been fortunate enough that her only direct experience with death had been through the aquarium in her room.

  Sophia seemed almost nonchalant about the topic of death, even as she examined it closely with her class. She’d accepted that death was part of life, and the death project reaffirmed that for her. When the class visited a museum that had everything to do with death, she was almost bored by it, even the section on the Day of the Dead, which I thought looked cool and scary at the same time. The project also touched on some religious ideas about the afterlife.

  At one point, Sophia told me she had “decided to believe in heaven,” and then another day, she said she wanted to come back as a bird or a dolphin in her next life. They had discussed reincarnation in class. It was obviously a child’s understanding of it, but it should have been clear to us then that she would choose a course called “lebenskunde” (which translates to lifestyles or life skills) over religion, both of which were offered in her public elementary school.

  Religion

  Germans teach religion in public school. The country’s law stipulates only that “there is no state church,” which is currently interpreted to mean that the government does not advocate for any one belief system. So religion is taught as a stand-alone class in public schools.

  Until the 1970s, most German children went to either Protestant or Catholic religion class, but as times changed, more and more parents opted their children out of the course. This happened for a variety of reasons: either the parents weren’t religious or perhaps they didn’t like the way it was being taught. German children who have an immigrant background often come from another religion entirely—Islam. So the German school systems in the various states have started offering other choices. Currently, religion class comes in several flavors, depending on the region and the preferences of the parents at the school. In many German states, religion is a mandatory class; the only alternative they offer for parents who want to opt their children out is an “ethics” class, a philosophical course that takes a neutral stance toward religion. (Ethics itself becomes a mandatory course starting around seventh grade.)

  In Berlin, which was once dubbed the “atheist capital of the world,” more than 60 percent of the population identifies as konfessionfrei (literally “confession-free” or nonreligious). This is nearly the mirror opposite of the statistics for the entire country: more than 60 percent of the German population claims a religious affiliation. In the United States, the percent of the faithful is closer to 77 percent. We are one of the most religious nations in the developed world, but keep in mind that believing in God is no casual affair in Germany. Upon entering the country, we were presented with an unusual tax form asking us whether we belonged to any religious faith. If we checked one of those boxes, our earnings would be taxed at 9 percent, which would go directly to the religious organization we named. Most churches in America ask their members to tithe around that amount, but in Germany, the government makes the religious put their money where their belief is.

  In Berlin and Brandenburg, the large population of nonreligious people have had an impact on the schools, and one of the most popular alternatives to taking a religion course in primary school is lebenskunde, a class that is sponsored by the German Humanist Association, which is an atheist and agnostic group.

  I didn’t know this when I first saw Sophia’s primary school schedule. All I saw was an hour blocked off for “Religion/Lebenskunde.” I thought that it was all one class: a generalized course on different “lifestyles” that included education about the world’s religions. But it wasn’t. Religion at our school was full-on Christian instruction, like Sunday school, except rather than on the weekend at church, it was during the week at public school. At our particular school, the class was neither Protestant nor Catholic, but a generalized course on the basic tenets of Christianity.

  This made me nervous. Being an American, I was used to coming across a wide variety of faiths, and I knew that some could be more extreme than others. I wasn’t eager to have my daughter indoctrinate
d into some brand of religion I knew nothing about. Zac came up with an equitable solution; he told Sophia that she could try out each class and decide for herself. I thought she might choose religion because of how nice heaven sounded to her, but instead, Sophia told us she preferred lebenskunde, mainly because she liked the teacher better. (Here’s a hint to the religions of the world seeking new members: hire fun teachers.)

  Although it was an atheist-sponsored course, lebenskunde taught Sophia about religions—all of them. Around the holidays, she came home with colored crèche scenes and a menorah. She also learned about Hindu gods, Buddha, and Mohammed, as well as Jesus Christ. The course didn’t focus on religion but covered a wide range of subjects, from children’s feelings to the change of seasons. It involved a lot of artwork, which Sophia loved, and games. Never did she come home saying that the teacher had told her not to believe in God.

  That’s not the primary focus of the class, according to Jaap Schilt, the head of lebenskunde training and education at the German Humanist Association. The class is more focused on teaching the children to ask questions and find their own answers. “One of the main goals in lebenskunde is to teach children to believe in their own capacities and to believe in themselves,” he said.