Achtung Baby: The German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children

by Sara Zaske

When Sara Zaske moved from Oregon to Berlin with her husband and toddler, she was surprised to discover that German parents give their children a great deal of freedom. In Berlin, kids walk to school by themselves, ride the subway alone, cut food with sharp knives and even play with fire. German parents did not share her parental fears and their children were thriving. Was she doing the opposite of what she intended, which was to raise capable children?

Through her own family's often funny experiences as well as interviews with other parents, teachers, and experts, Zaske shares the many unexpected parenting lessons she learned from living in Germany. Achtung Baby reveals that today's Germans know something that other parents don't (or have perhaps forgotten) about raising kids with 'selbstandigkeit' (self-reliance), and provides many new and practical ideas parents everywhere can use to give their own children the freedom they need to grow into responsible, independent adults.

Genres: Parenting, Nonfiction, Memoir, Education, Germany, Audiobook, Childrens

253 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 2, 2018

About the author

Sara Zaske is a writer who has bounced from the US to Germany and back again. Her articles have appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, The ATLANTIC.COM and TIME.COM among other places.

Her new book about how Germans raise self-reliant children, ACHTUNG BABY, is available now from Picador USA.

She also has young adult fantasy novel THE FIRST (2012)

Reviews

[Dawnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay let me start this out with:
I am not a mother, i do not have children i take care of (at least not the human kind -do furry kids count?!?)
BUT i was interested in this because i am German and i always interested to see an American share their option on Germany. Because honestly most of the time? Its HORRIBLE and wrong and just... in which year are you living because we are no longer in world war 2?
So yes, okay?
I only requested this book because it has a german title and the subtitle of an american mom learning the german art was just enough to make me click "request" on NetGalley and read this book.

But honestly? Its pretty GOOD!

I think its a nice book if you simply want a view into a different culture -or like me are just curious to see your own culture compared to a different one and actually see the differences.

I would defiantly recommend giving this book a read! If nothing else, it is quiet entertaining to read the author struggle through german's bureaucracy and all the paper work.
(because yes, she got that PERFECTLY!)


Lets start with me saying that:
I LOVE her for actually saying that America did not save or ended the second World war, that America is not the sole saver of everyone and that they did not influence Germany and make it into the country it is today.
Because THANK YOU! Its nice to read that from an American, that actually summaries the European history and America's part in it as it most likely was and does show that Germany is not this huge anti-everything country. That Germans are not the devil, evil or against any and all people that are not blond and blue eyed.

I also appreciated that she actually said she expected germany and its people to be completely different to how they actually are.

Because that is just how is.
We all have specific stereo-typical notions we grow up in from different countries around the world.
I grew up with the believe that Americans all only ever eat McDonalds and eat it in from of their TV. I am just guessing here but i don't think thats really what all of America is like.

Moving on the to actual "Parenting aspects" of this book:

I think that her entire attitude towards letting kids explore, learn and decide for themselves what to be scared of what to do and when is great. And yes in some way resembling some aspects of how kids in Germany do grow up.

And she is defiantly right that in germany most kids spend a good amount of time outside especially when they are still in the ages between toddler years and 10 years old. Not as much in the last 10 years as it has been when even i personally was growing up, but yes, kids in Germany are mostly told to go outside to play and run their energy off.
(can i just add that i never even thought about that that might be something new or strange to anyone? Because how else would little kids play if not outside in any and all weather for the most parts?)

Its also nice to read that the author clearly took some nice parenting ideas with her from Europe.

I honestly think that we could all learn from each other on how to raise our children, maybe find a way to combine different aspects to finally raise an entire generation of children that don't fear everything they don't know, don't hate people that look different or believe differently then they themselves or even just generally learn that every human is just the same as any other human in most aspects.

So it was GREAT to see those principles being talked about and mentioned.

I also loved how she shared little snippets of her kids how they struggled with the culture differences and how her daughter ask her if it was allowed for the kids to wait for their mom in a cafe until she had gone to the toilet.
For one because that entire concept i a bit strange for me as someone having grown up with it being completely normal that as soon as you can go to the toilet on your own, you go do that even in a cafe when you know or can find it on your own, or when its just normal your parent can leave you in a place that like that for a few minutes until they return.
So reading that it is NOT something completely normal and typical was a bit of an eye opener on just how different growing up in different areas of the world really are.


And now lets get into the negative (or should i say the things a German finds a bit annoying and strange because i never heard of it in that way and shouldn't i have as a German?):

- its really, really, extremely over simplifies and generalises Germany as a whole.
Berlin is a huge city, its also a world city with a huge mixture of different cultures, believes and school systems all mixed together. I am not saying its a whole different world than the rest of Germany, but it is quiet different to a lot of other areas in Germany. Especially since -as the book itself states- Berlin was split into two very different Germany's for a long time. So it mixes a lot of very different German believes together.

What i mean by that is (For example i am not listing EVERY SINGLE thing here because that would be about the size the actual book had, but just... you know, some examples to showcase what i noticed right away and found bit annoying!):

- German kids go or ride their bikes to school alone -at the latest from second year on.
Which is NO!
Excuse me? What are you talking about!
Lets start out with the biking!
Not all german parents let their kids ride their bikes to school basically from second grade on. For example its actually not allowed in Bavaria where i live until the kid is in fourth grade -or in other words at least eight, most of the time nine years old and actually have to complete something that i can most easy translate into a "bike license" (meaning you have to take a test that shows that you can successfully navigate your bike through traffic without problem and only after you pass that test and get your "license" you are allowed to drive your bike to school!)

And while it is true that a lot of kids walk to school alone from second grade on, they don't walk ALONE, they go into groups of other kids that meet up at the latest two streets from their home.

German public schools short their kids from specific districts the houses are marked under. So specific neighbour groups of houses all go to the same school, and with that a good amount of children go to and from the same school at the same times.

There are at least always in the morning specific adults present on busy streets to assure that kids don't get hurt.
And that is how i personally as a German know that it goes down with letting kids go to school in the whole of Germany.

So yes, sure in a way in Germany Kids from a very young age go to school without their parents.
But they do not go alone.

They go with at least three to four other kids either their age or older and on the way there are a few adults placed that look out for them on streets that might be dangerous.
I don't know if that is something unique or strange or different to america. Who knows? Apparently if the book got the American side right.


- since we are on topic of schools... shall we talk about that?
Because that hippy-dippy- lets all play and have a great time mojo? Thats "waldorf" schools. Which are basically special education places where its a lot more easy going and slower paced learning with lots of breaks.
i am not in any way saying those are bad schools! They are actually good schools, but sadly hard to get places in for most kids and also a lot of them are not public but private or you have to have a special needs child to qualify for them in many areas in Germany (maybe thats different in Berlin. Could be. Possibly)

But they are NOT the norm in germany. The school that the author description in America -teacher talking and talking and talking and handing out lines and punishments if you are not doing what they want?- THAT sounds like a typical german school!

Also the after school "hort" the author mentioned? Not something that most schools actually offer, its a special program that a kid has to go to after school most of the time not even in school but for example housed in Kindergärten and are not for doing homework but rather to keep the kid busy until the parent can come get them after work.
I am not saying that they don't exist in the way the author described them. But they are not the norm at all in germany, and not typical in the way that she described them as.


- And than there is the entire section on parenting time:
the book basically states that every one that has a child is allowed up to three years without problem, either mom or dad, during which they will get paid and than get their job back if they take those years without problems.
Sure theoretically on paper that might even be mostly true.
In actuality??
Sorry, NO!
Most people are lucky if they get six months, and the payment they get after two or three months is no where near what they normally make, so that most people have no choice but to go back to work as soon as possible to be actually able to continue to make the money they need to ... you know buy stuff? For example for the kid they just had?

Also i will not even touch the subject of that that entire deal with the fathers being able to take that time to make it easier on not discriminating against specific women in jobs. The characters i have for this review would not be enough to clearly prove that so completely wrong.

Lets just say that in theory, yes sure in germany there is such a thing as parent time and you even earn a little money and either parent can take it, even the father, but yeah... just because something theoretically exists does not mean that it actually works... and leave it at that.



so there are some things in this book that as a German, born and raised and still living there as an adult, are a bit of head scratchers.


still this book was not a bad book

And of course its hard to put an entire country and all its different states, customs and ideas into one book. And she could have hardly named the book "the Berlin way of rising a child" so i get it.

And for the most part, Sara Zaske did a great job with sharing how Germans raise their children.


*Thanks to NetGalley, the publishers and the author for providing me with a free e-copy of this book in exchange for a free and honest review!*

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a mom of 3 and as an elementary teacher, I'm always up for a read relating to children and parenting. I enjoyed the tiger mom book comparing Asian parenting with its US version. When I heard that Achtung Baby was out -- a book comparing German parenting with US -- I was thrilled. I *am* German; what a perfect book for me to read!

The book's author is Sara Zaske. She heads to Germany with her husband, who gets a job there, and their toddler-aged daughter. They live in Germany for several years, during which time she has a son. They move back to America when her kids are about first and fourth grade age. This book is based on her observations during her time in Germany. They lived in Berlin.

Sara begins: "I wanted to raise my children to be strong, independent, free individuals -- all very American values. Yet I tended to use paradoxical parenting practices: constantly correcting my children, overemphasizing their academic achievement, and closely supervising them to ensure their safety. Moving to Germany made me realize how American these practices were -- and how misguided."

Basically, Zaske observes that Germans give their children much more freedom than Americans do. She discusses how Germans let babies fall asleep on their own rather than the more American practice of rocking the baby to sleep. In short, there's not a lot of "attachment parenting" in Germany. Children in Germany are in preschool earlier and more often than US kids, and German parents tend to think this is a good thing, with little "mommy guilt" that we expect here in the states. German children walk or bike to school regularly. Eight-year-olds walking to school, traversing busy intersections, is not an unusual thing. Zaske mentions that in America, parents have been arrested for things like this that are everyday occurrences in Germany.

Achtung Baby is bound to raise the question, which method is better? Zaske clearly favors the German method, frequently touting its successes while speaking negatively about US parenting. As a more-experienced mom, I can understand some of this. I think all of us as parents tend to idealize the situation we're in when our own children are little. I can see advantages to the German parenting methods, and I am a proponent of giving children freedom. I'll always remember our "MOPS mentor" (an older mom who came to MOPS meetings when my girls were little) calling me "the laid-back mom." And I pretty much was. I didn't tend to check on my kids throughout the night to ensure they were still breathing, or hover over them as they played. Then again, there were definitely parts of the German parenting model as presented that I didn't care for.

For instance, I never put my kids in preschool and was honestly sad when the time came for them to begin kindergarten. I cherished my time with them at home. Germans seem to feel that kids benefit more from the company of their peers than of their parents, even at a young age. Homeschooling is not just discouraged in Germany: it's illegal. This is just speculation on my part, but I wonder if part of this stems from the communist background that at least half of Berlin was under until fairly recently. "Children belong to the state, not their parents" is a very Communist line of thought.

Zaske frequently added disclaimers to statements in Achtung Baby. When I finished, I concluded that, while there are probably a few broad differences in parenting between Germans and Americans, the differences may not be all that great. I don't feel, for instance, that the divide here would be nearly as large as that between US and Asian parents. Shortly after I began this book, I was sitting at Disney's Animal Kingdom waiting for a show, when I heard two people conversing in German behind me. I turned around and asked them (in German!) if they were from Germany. Thankfully, they switched over to flawless English and I learned that they had moved to Florida a few years ago from Stuttgart, along with their then-infant daughter. They both teach at the university here. I told them I'd begun reading a book comparing German and American parenting, and asked them what differences they saw. They both looked a little perplexed, and said that they felt that things probably depended more on the individual parent. They didn't really notice any differences. Stuttgart is in southern Germany, so I'm wondering again whether what Zaske observed was a more Berlin-specific, East German phenomena.

What I gathered from the book is that we in the US can help our kids with a few tips from German parents: don't be afraid to give your kids responsibility. Let them play outdoors more. Let them play creatively rather than always in a planned, academic, media-focused way.

Zaske finishes Achtung Baby: "The biggest lesson I learned in Germany 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."

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sara Zaske wrote this book about her experiences of raising her children in Berlin, Germany. Instead of being preachy and telling parent's do's and don't's, she explains her direct experiences with a different mode of parenting. What I love about Zaske is not only is she open minded to German parenting methods, but she is completely honest with her thought process, the surprises she encountered, and honest when she disagrees with some of it.

What Zaske shares is that German culture and German schooling expects parents to give their children certain freedoms and rights. Basically that kids will be responsible for themselves from an young age - this includes going to the park alone, walking to school alone, travel, etc. Zaske is honest that she doesn't readily give her children the complete freedom that some of the other parents do, but basically that she eventually gives her children more freedoms as the get used to their routines.

German schools also value free play, and lots of it, during school. This is something beyond what Americans can imagine. Germans have found children are more focused when they need to be the more free time and play they are given. I really loved hearing this, although it makes it hard for me to imagine that happening here in America. German early schooling also incorporates decision making. For example, the teachers ask students for ideas on what they should learn next and then everyone participates.

Zaske talks about how in Germany the parents often band together to make changes in their schools for the benefit of their children. While the US has the PTA organization, American parents tend to not be involved - I feel the direct cause of this is organized sports and clubs that Americans are obsessed with. They don't have time - Germans seem to not be into organized activities for children and are more supportive of free play, where children make the decisions on what to do with their time. I feel that is a much more natural approach.

Zaske does give a brief explanation on how her children had to adjust when moving back to America and the expectations here. She also mentions some of the changes that she has tried to implement. I think it would be interesting if she was able to get more of the positive parts of German-influenced school approaches implemented here. California, where the author lives, seems like the perfect area to do a trial.

Great read, excellent resources, & relieved me of some of the stress and guilt I held since I am apt to give my children some more freedoms than others see as appropriate.

[briz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't think I'd like this book, or agree with this book, as much as I did. But I think I spent almost every sentence going "Yes!" and "Amen!" and "Preach!"

My partner is German, and I now have several in-laws raising small children in Berlin, so much of what this book describes was not news to me. In fact, it provided a very good "crash course" on modern Germanity, in addition to modern German parenting. For example, Germany's processing of its painful history - WW2 and the Holocaust - and how that acts as a morally damning counterfactual to America's refusal to process ITS painful history (slavery and the genocide/destruction of indigenous American culture).

But, just sticking to parenting, the main ideas here are that America has gone whole hog on "intensive parenting", "helicopter parenting", call it what you will. And that that is bad: rising anxiety for both parents and kids, narrowing down of "safe" kid options to screentime, etc. I didn't know about this until I became a parent but sheeeesh, the stuff you see on playgrounds is NUTS. The norm seems to be the parent that literally follows their small child around the playground, saying, "Why don't we play with this? Oh look, it spins! See, you can spin it! Do you want to try spinning it?" For the love of God, why are you telling your child how to play!? Every toddler interaction is mediated by the adult caregivers nearby - sooo many times have I seen parents acting as traffic cops telling one child to get off the slide, that child to slide now, the other child to wait. It's not the end of the world is the kids bump into each other on the slide! And so on. Why, once I saw a father with his pubescent kids - they must have been 10 and 12 or so - hovering over them by the swings, then by the slides, etc. He looked bored. I wanted to scream at him: LEAVE THEM ALONE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

Anyway. Before getting dropped into this culture, I had no idea about it. I missed the memo. And it agitates me greatly. Things that were normalized when I was growing up - biking to the playground at age 10, playing there, wandering around - are now, literally (!), criminalized. It's absolutely bonkers.

I'm not the only agitated parent, of course; there's been the backlash to this trend via the free range parenting movement, and so on.

ANYWAY. What I like about Achtung Baby is that Zaske offers a powerful counterfactual - and this book is clearly a cri de coeur advocacy piece (which is why I think it rubs some of the critical reviewers' the wrong way). Zaske is as agitated and outraged as I am by the current American parenting culture. By offering Germany - or Berlin, specifically - as a counterexample, she highlights the insanity. Again, living with a German partner, I hear this on the daily. And it's true - when you're living in the "American exceptionalism" bubble - you sort of don't realize what's "normal" here may not be very normal in other countries. And that's valuable! We can take what's good from other places.

What I especially liked in Zaske's writing was:

(1) She frames the cultural difference as a fundamental philosophical difference between respecting children's rights (Germany) and not (America). That is, American helicopter parenting is essentially about control and surveillance: your child is your project, your mini-me, and - in the name of protecting them against the infinitesimally risky (e.g. child kidnapping) - you allow them zero freedom. The US is the only non-signee of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Zaske explains that this is because American "parent's rights" groups objected to the rights of children to, e.g., NOT be hit (no corporal punishment), be a different religion from their parents, or have freedom of movement (!).

I had never thought about children's rights in this sort of concrete, political way before. But I was really compelled by Zaske's argument about how Germans frame their children as having a "right" to learn how to live in and explore their world. That is, by never allowing your child the freedom to take a, say, "risky" subway ride, you're sheltering them to the point of imprisoning them. You're stunting their development, to their own detriment. This is why, for example, homeschooling is illegal in Germany - the right of the child to be educated outside of their parents' narrow worldview is paramount. Indeed, homeschooling (which I have seen mostly among left-wing/liberal American parents) is viewed in Germany as a potential avenue for trapping kids in insular, fundamentalist corners of society (a la Tara Westover's upbringing, for example).

(2) Another thing I really liked was Zaske's strong framing of the macroeconomic and institutional forces which perpetuate each country's parenting culture. One of the criticisms of Bringing Up Bebe, for example, was that the author insufficiently attributed French parenting culture to all those great policies - the generous maternity leave, generous childcare options, and so on, all government provided. I thought she did a decent job, but Zaske is even more focused on structure and policy - again, this is how the book tips over into advocacy. She mentions organizations like LetGrow.org and policies like Common Core, and how they have important impacts on everyday parenting decisions and lives (e.g. having to hound your 5-year-old to do homework because of the academicization of kindergarten).

Highly recommended!

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like so many things in life, I think my own expectations really hamstrung my experience. I expected to enjoy this book because I like reading about cross-cultural experiences and non traditional/alternative education practices. And sure, this book has those in spades, along with some good anecdotes about the foibles of getting settled in a new country.

Unfortunately this book also has a strident, preachy tone that really grated on my nerves. So often I found myself frustrated because while I agreed with some of what she was advocating for, I bristled at her tone or attitude, ESPECIALLY when she would end by saying if American parents would just "start a movement" we could change American culture to be more German. How can someone be that naive and condescending at the same time?

Likewise, I felt personally snubbed that in her soap box rant about working women and motherhood, she had no room for someone like me who has given up a career willingly in order to give my kids the kind of "German" childhood she so admires. Which reminds me: Sara, if you're reading this, there's no need for you to fight the public school system at every step for the next decade or more. If you really want your kids to have a play based, minimally supervised, interest-led, project-based education then homeschool!

Most disturbing of all, I also felt rebuffed because fundamentally, I want my children to be firmly bonded to me and would be happiest if they would adopt most of my values (while admitting that they will definitely differentiate from me as adults in some areas. That's definitely ok, even great, but it's not my GOAL for them to differentiate at 6 or 7). She shrugged this off and had nothing but praise for the systematic de-coupling of children from parents in Germany.

To conclude, then, I appreciated some aspects of the message, but the messenger definitely got in the way for me. I wish there had been more humility and more critical thinking instead of just lateral praise.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

The U.S. educational system has gone in the wrong direction cutting down on recess, over-emphasizing literacy, and slamming kids with testing. Zaske does an excellent and fair-minded job exploring the German child care and kindergarten system and its strengths--interwoven with the memoir of her own family living abroad. She picks important focal points: the generally positive German attitude towards child care (opposed to America's cult of attachment parenting, born of profound ambivalence about and hostility to women who work, in spite of that being the economic necessity for the majority of contemporary parents); the emphasis on free play in those care environments (including some "no toys" weeks designed to direct children towards imaginative play and resilience); the commitment to kids' independence, including a "free range" style mastery over urban environments (I totally see Zaske's point here and will admit, as she does, some anxiety about it, given my American supervision-oriented upbringing!) and playground structures that incorporate risk into learning; religious (including atheist/agnostic) and sex education in schools.

On the one hand, I could respond to the book in a kind of smug way. My daughter goes to a wonderful private school that prioritizes the values that the German child care system--and by extension Zaske--espouses. On the other hand, how awful that these approaches that work, not only for teaching children a love of learning but also for instilling in them resilience and serenity (like extended periods of time spent in the outdoors), are systematically denied to students without the money or privilege to opt out of the public school system organized around top-down teaching and desk-sitting discipline. (Oh, another chapter that was very powerful was the one on German schools and Nazism and the Holocaust; U.S. public schools still do not know how to teach indigenous genocide or slavery--and teaching them badly or partially is in many cases just as bad as not teaching about these episodes in our past at all. And the emphasis is not on collective national responsibility, as it seems to be in Germany.) So it was disheartening to think that we seem to be moving further away from having a thriving school system that incorporates play, nature, and independence into education.

Not to mention having subsidized pre-K child care and subsidized university education, which would also do so much to narrow the gap of inequality, as Zaske points out here. Part and parcel of our country's fetishization of the stay-at-home mom as the whole source of a child's nurturance is our neoliberal sense that each family is responsible for ensuring the child's development, never mind the financial and logistical barriers. In her chapter on limiting or eliminating homework, Zaske points out that for children in low-income families where the care-giving adults also have limited education, homework only accelerates frustration and confusion. If kids didn't understand in the classroom, homework basically prescribes a tutorial with the parents, which requires that the parents have the time, the knowledge, etc.

Given my feelings of pessimism about the U.S. educational system trajectory, I was encouraged that, even though Zaske does pitch her book to the individual parent who might want to change his or her attitude about parenting (which is the classic neoliberal solution to a structural problem--fix your attitude!), she also recognizes that the problems run deeper and can only have political and collective solutions, so she recommends organizations you can join and also speaking up on the local level. When she returns to the U.S. and her daughter Sophia is hopelessly bored in school, Zaske starts on this path, and though she admits that a good bit of that PTA advocacy falls on deaf ears, this recourse to organizations and governance avoids indulging the fantasy that one parent could embrace this "German art" without broader cultural change.

[Karin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting, well-written book about an American family who spent 6 yrs in Germany and what Sara and her family learned about raising kids in a letting-go way. To raise responsible, self reliant kids, German parents let them do things like: walk to school by themselves, go to the store and park by themselves, go on the subway by themselves, ride bikes by themselves. AS soon as the kids are asking to do something and the parents feel it will help them function better in their world, they hold their breath and say 'yes'. Not everyone; the helicopter parent is also alive in Germany but the laws and attitudes of the majority make sure that children keep those rights.

Reminds me of when i was growing up. WE could ride our bikes anywhere, go for a 15 minute walk to the candy store, walk to the library if we wanted to go. Now kids can barely sneeze without being checked for the flu.

This was a lot easier when we lived in the city. Tom would come to us and say what he felt like he should be allowed to do and we would talk about it. I would watch him to see if he was actually following the rules of the road and of biking and if he was, increase his boundry-lines. Somewhere along the line he was allowed to go to the park down the street as long as he was with a friend or 2.

Unfortunately in the hilly countryside at the edge of North Bay, it's a bit harder to 'let' my daughter have the same freedom as it's hard for a kid to learn how to ride a bike and practise on the road we live on. So biking is done as a father-daughter activity where they drive to the city and then bike around. Hopefully this summer she'll be confident enough to ride around on our street. (She learned how to ride a bike just last year, thanks to our busy, hilly street and the fact that we were doing ocd therapy when she was little and that took up our energy and time). We had tried it a few times with Tom's old kiddie - bike, but she was too scared, so we gave up. It wasn't that important compared to therapy and dancing.

I like the values in this book and hope i'll remember. Kat is almost 12 now, so the 11 yr old age-restrictions are behind us. I worried when i left my 10 yr old in the car with the doors locked and a book, more about what other adults would say, than if she were going to get kidnapped. As an only child (she's 14 yrs younger than her brother) she's very responsible and adult about many things.

I and my dh just need to not be afraid of what others think, trust ourselves and how well we know our daughter and slowly let her go.

I was always a proponent of stay-at-home mothering if i could but when my son was a child I worked part-time as a substitute teacher, so Tom went to different child care arrangement. He liked going to after-school care at his first school, and they let me pay by the day, so sometime's i'd let him go there just to play with his friends.
According to Zaske, this is good for kids. IN Germany most kids go to day cares after their long parental leaves are over. These are play based day cares. The way she described them make me rethink my 'mommy is best' beliefs. Katrina started day care at 14 months b/c my ocd was so bad, i wanted her to learn what it was like to be around normal people! Foretunately we were able to get 2-days-a -week care b/c of my illness while my dh was back at school. Later when he was working we just paid it ourselves until she was old enuf for pre-k. In Germany however, the preschool teachers are all educated. It's not a minimum wage job. The teachers find out what the children want to learn and then provide them with time, materials etc to do the learning. This even includes how to use matches, knives and other tools! They believe kids need to learn how to be comfortable in their environment instead of just to be safe. Learning how to use the tools is more empowering and safe than being told just to stay away from them.

[Private Account · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was okay, not nearly as good as Bringing Up Bebe, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the Swedish parenting one, or the Amish parenting one. The essential difference between the books in this genre that are great and the ones that suck is the preaching and the science. Parenting anthropology is awesome. I love it. I want to hear about things Germans do differently! I don't want to hear the science that backs it up and makes their way of doing it "right." I don't want to be preached at. And I especially don't want politics.

And on her politics: I will never understand why the narrative of slavery means: "White people are bad." (Yes, she goes on and on about this.) I don't understand why the narrative doesn't go instead: "In the history of the world, humans always enslaved other humans, but then, in the 1800's, something AMAZING happened. One race decided that it was not okay. And then something happened that had never happened before -- that race fought one another -- white people fought their own families, killed their own cousins, their brothers ... for black people. White people killed other white people for the freedom of black people!!! That is the most incredible and strange thing to have happened! It's unheard of! And definitely not evolutionarily sound -- very bad idea DNA-wise. White people are a total anomaly!!! How amazing and awesome! And today, white people STILL don't enslave anyone! But if you google "slavery today" you will see that it is still practiced by all other races. Slavery still exists in every country in the world except the white majority (but not for long) ones. White people are amazing!!!!"

That should be the narrative about slavery. And instead it's somehow that white people are bad. This makes zero sense.

Likewise I don't get the WW2 endless apologetics and Germans Are Bad. WW2 happened because an entire country of people went bad. They're just bad bad bad and no one did anything to make them bad. What's the saying? "It takes two to Tango." Wars don't start in a vacuum. A country of people doesn't "go bad." I haven't studied ww2 yet, but I will soon, and I am pretty sure that what I won't find is a random evil bully and a totally innocent victim. Or bullies and victims at all. Wars are about power, wealth, and survival. For the people at the top, they’re just business. The bully and victim stories are told to people at the bottom to get them to play along, not because they are actually true.

So I would say skip this book and read the Swedish parenting one — very similar differences to the German parenting one but (a little) less political.

[Carin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a parent so you wouldn't think I am the audience for this book but it was utterly fascinating. Sara and her husband moved to Germany for his work, along with their baby. It takes them a while to get settled in. but once they do, everyone starts asking Sara when they're going to enroll their toddler in preschool/daycare. Sara is confused as she's not working so she had assumed that she was taking care of their daughter, especially since a mother is the best and most important person in her world and in the best position to provide her with everything she needs, right? Right? Well, that's certainly not the assumption in Berlin. Instead, it is assumed that the child will learn from her peers and learn how to navigate social settings, along with a lot of other benefits, and it's kind of crazy not to send your child to school. So, Sara realizes she can pursue her long-delayed dream of being a writer and send her daughter to daycare, only to discover she's pregnant again.

So now she gets to navigate the German system from scratch, learning about how your register at the hospital ahead of time, even for a home birth, so if things go awry and you end up at the hospital, you aren't trying to fill out mounds of paperwork while in active labor. She meets her midwives, and the one for after the birth is especially helpful in showing Sara how, by not saying no to her son at all to anything during the day, she was in part creating the situation where he screamed all night. It's not Ferberizing, but it also isn't attachment parenting at all. Which makes sense, in a country where people park their strollers with kids in them outside a restaurant or coffee shop before they go inside to eat and see friends.

And that's not the only baffling thing Sara experiences in the five years of raising her kids there. in kindergarten children do these long, complicated projects where they have to not only learn about a topic they pick out, but figure out what they're going to learn, and where they're going to get the information from. She's confused that one of the topics to be mastered in grade school is "traffic and mobility" until she discovers that, by third grade, her daughter is the only one in her class whose parent is still walking her to school. All the rest walk or bike themselves to school, crossing busy streets, some of them going further than a mile. Then she gets a permission slip asking if it's okay for her daughter to use matches at school in a section about fire. That's after the section they've already done on knives.

Obviously, Germans value autonomy and independence above all else in school. And while Grammar and math might take a back seat in the first few years (they don't really care if a child hasn't mastered reading by the end of first grade, figuring he/she will learn eventually when they're ready), scores on international testing, the same tests where Americans score abysmally so we add more testing, and our scores get worse, they do pretty well. A big part of this mentality comes from the understandable very strong anti-totalitarianism mentality in Germany. And there are still some residual differences in the former East Germany, where, for example, the rates of day care use are highest, as under communism all women worked.

While the book is pitched as a parenting guide for parenting the German way, I instead read it as a memoir of moving to Germany with a young family, with a side of sociology about the educational field. And as someone childless by choice, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read it in just over one day. Couldn't put it down. And couldn't stop talking about it for weeks afterwards, thoroughly annoying all my friends and family.

[Emre Sevinç · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a while since I've read and reviewed a parenting book, therefore, when my brother's wife recommended a parenting book with a catchy and interesting title, I took note of it. I decided to read "Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children" in Germany, during our trip to Schwarzwald (Black Forest), enjoying the perfect weather and scenery, while sipping my drink at the pool, German kids running around me (with a few Swiss, French and British kids added to the mix).

As a father of a 7-year-old & a 10-month-old living in Belgium, and frequently making trips to Germany and the Netherlands, I found the book more informative on what happened to USA in the recent years, rather than how Germans, particularly Berliners, raised their kids. I found the book not only very readable, but also it provided me with the perfect contrasts between Europe and USA. A striking theme of the book was the irony of the "freedom rhetoric" of USA, and how at the same time children were so much controlled by their parents, coupled with "parent's rights", and not much about children's rights (the Wikipedia article titled "U.S. ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child" sheds more light on it). Another striking point was how happy the author, a mother of two children, felt because of the social safety net provided for families, as well as the ability to take 2 weeks of uninterrupted vacations with her family (that she found 'luxurious').

What also drew my attention was how USA was pushing academic achievement, turning it to a kind of crazy race, even before the children started primary school: I learned from the author that "kindergarten is the new first grade" in USA, meaning that younger and younger USA children were expected to master a lot of reading, writing and math skills even before they started the primary school, and there were even 'exams' for some kindergartens. I know firsthand what such pressure does to kids, having been subjected to many exams and put into 'race' at a very early age when I was a kid back in Istanbul.

The part about "risk taking" of children can be considered the best part of the book: the author gave many examples about "dangerous" playgrounds of Berlin, and how it helped children of various ages gauge the risks for themselves and learn the take responsibility for their actions and their consequences. What I found revealing was the fact that the safer you made the playground, the more difficulties the children had estimating the risks, leading to overcompensating to have adequate excitement, which, in turn, led to more dangerous actions ironically!

I really liked this book, and can recommend it to parents both in Europe and in USA to understand the current trends better. Oh, and I'll always remember this book whenever I shout "pas op!", "wees voorzichtig!", or "dikkatli ol! yavaş!" to my kids. Who knows, maybe I'll even should less, and be more relaxed with those highly energetic kids, entrusting them to the legacy of human evolution a little more.

[Amanda Hasan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am really glad that I read this book after my kids grew up a little (my children are 6 and 8). Some of the things she talks about would have settled poorly with me when my kids were younger. The way she criticizes American parenting, especially Dr. Sears' method of "attachment parenting," would have rubbed me the wrong way back when I was a new mother and wanted to be the very best at everything while martyring myself in the process. Years later, I've chilled out quite a bit. I don't need to dote on my kids' every little need, cut, scrape, bump, and bruise. I can let them ride their bikes alone down the street to a friend's. I can send my oldest into the store to buy a gallon of milk with my debit card. I don't get into the whole "parenting style" thing anymore. I do what seems logical and what works best for me and my family. What I tend to do naturally, however, is what Zaske has termed "German parenting," (or, at least, Berliner parenting) so it was interesting to see a label put to something I was already doing. Seeing it applied in a broader, social context was really interesting as well. I typically feel that I parent much differently than my American friends and acquaintances, so I was not able to imagine what it would look like if I lived in a place where everyone parented like me.

Overall, really insightful book with lots of food for thought.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really appreciate how the author balanced her personal experiences with interviews and extensive research from both German and U.S. sources.

I majored in German, lived in Germany, have worked for many years with Germans, and am married to one. There is so much about the German culture and language that feels like home to me, including how children are raised there. But without having been raised there myself I feel like I didn’t fully understand WHY Germans parent the way they do. My husband does it naturally, of course, but I needed more information and Zaske’s book delivers completely.

After reading this book I have started challenging myself to let my young daughter decide for herself what risks she’s ready to take and I encourage her to do much more on her own, supporting her as needed, but directing so much less. I feel less responsible for my child’s happiness and more capable of helping her become resilient and self-reliant.

I highly recommend this book if you feel stifled by the expectations American culture increasingly puts upon parents and children, and/or if you suspect there’s another way to parent that might resonate more with you and your values.

[Puty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book because I'm particularly interested in the differences among parenting styles and the cultural reasons behind them. I'm also aware that we just can't generalize a country and put it in a book, especially a country like Germany. Good thing that the author was aware of this and mentioned it a couple of times. She explained the context and mostly used the American (or the upper-middle-class USA, to be exact) style of parenting as a comparison to the German way.

As a middle-class Indonesian, I find this book insightful because I can somehow relate to the 'American style' and how being a bit more 'German' can be good if I want my kids to be more responsible and self-reliant. Yet, I also learned the limitation, for example how the kita (day care) is very reliable and works really well in Germany.

This book also explained the historical and cultural contexts in German parenting properly (at least for me who just knew that kindergarten was German invention...)

Last note for this short review: If you're really into American (or the upper-middle-class USA, to be exact) style of parenting, you might find it pretty condescending.

[nukie19 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated Zaske's stories about raising her children in Berlin and think she had some great points about how American parents aren't great at giving their children freedoms. I do think she misses the point in a few places, though. For instance, letting children move around neighborhoods on their own - I would struggle to allow my daughter to cross the street behind our house not because I don't think she is responsible, but because drivers here are not used to seeing children out alone and therefore do not allow them the space or safety net to be in those spaces. I will continue to try and give my daughter freedoms and will use the stories from this book as a guide, but I don't think without major cultural changes that it is even possible to parent in most of the US the way Zaske saw in Berlin.

[Mainon · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite pregnancy/childrearing books so far. The general premise is that German parents in many ways raise their children to be more self-reliant -- they walk to school alone at an early age, do lots of things unsupervised, have more dangerous playgrounds, etc. The theory, as Zaske puts it, is that this teaches kids to self-motivate and manage risk better and earlier, so they're generally better prepared to, well, start living their own lives successfully.

Obviously I'm simplifying things (as is Zaske) but the fundamental concept seems right to me. Helicopter parenting is a great way to make sure your children rely on you to make their decisions, provide their motivation, and manage their interests. This gave me lots to think about it terms of what kind of parent I want to be -- and what kind of child I want to raise, even if it's scary to yield control.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited about this books debut. I enjoy reading books about various parenting techniques. I pick and chose what works for our family. Achtung Baby started out interesting as the author compared and contrasted various parenting methods and observations from her experiences as a parent in USA and Germany. As the book went on I felt like author was defending the choices she has made as a parent that she feels guilty about.

Ultimately left me disappointed.

[W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book along the lines of its French counterpart Bringing Up Bebe. The premise of both books is that Americans have a lot to learn about raising happy, healthy, independent children.

While Zaske acknowledges that parenting practices can vary a lot in Germany, there are still a lot of commonalities that she witnessed in her time living in Berlin. Basically, most Germans practice what we would call "Free-Range Parenting" (otherwise known as "parenting" in many European countries): they let their children walk to school alone at a young age, give their children the freedom to play without always hovering over them, and introduce scary topics and practices (like sex ed, drinking, and fire) with the idea that if children and teens learn how to handle these things safely, they will be less likely to engage in risky/dangerous behaviors when they are older.

She also delves into the cultural and educational history of Germany, highlighting how Germans truly own the atrocities of their past, and how they have learned from their mistakes and therefore have gone on to make real changes in their attitudes and beliefs.

I didn't agree with all the ideas though - in particular, I wasn't a fan of the way Zaske handled literacy. At one point, she interview a psychologist, who says "German middle-class parents will often engage their babies in dialogue as if they can talk back, even though they can't possibly answer. She also told me that American mothers in one study took this even further and read books to three-month old babies, who cannot possibly follow along, in a belief that it will help them learn later." Later Zaske mentions how there is no push to teach children to read until they are developmentally ready, which they believe in Germany is around 7-8 years old. After being initially offended by this, I read some studies that confirmed that if children are pushed to learn to read at a very young age, they will often come to dislike reading because it is "work." But I fear that people who read this will misunderstand the meaning to be "don't read to/with your child." While I completely disagree with her first statement - reading to your young infant is a wonderful way to bond, it lets them hear the sound of your voice, and yes, it does introduce the foundations of literacy and language (and as a librarian I must 100 PERCENT ENCOURAGE THIS), I can see why "teaching" your child to read at 4 years old through flash cards, repetition, and for-profit programs is counterintuitive. (But seriously, please, don't stop reading to your child and making books a fun and essential part of their lives.) This also echos how Germans feel about education in general: while in America pre-school and kindergarten have become academic classes, in Germany they take a more play-based approach for the first few years of school and let kids learn about subjects of their own choosing.

Germany's parenting philosophies sound like the way I would like to raise my child, but I can see how many American parents (myself included, an only child with a sheltered childhood, raising an only child with some special medical and developmental needs) are reluctant to let their children have this type of freedom. We are living in a culture of fear, and while I used to scoff at the memory of my mother letting me walk "alone" to school in 6th grade (just a few blocks away) and then following behind me in the car, I can now understand how hard it must have been for her to let go. It doesn't help that, as Zaske points out many times, American laws prevent us from being too free-range (she points out famous cases of parents who were arrested for making seemingly minor decisions about leaving their school-aged children alone).

As my son is growing up, I think I will need constant reminders to give him the freedom to make his own choices and be his own person, so this may be a book I end up purchasing.

[Amy Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s not often that non-fiction keeps my attention for long, but I could not put this book down. I enjoy reading things that challenge cultural norms, and this book did so from page one. I am a homeschooling mom of four boys, so this book resonated with me deeply, especially since I am currently not participating in the US public school system. That being said, there were many things in this book I did not “agree” with, but loved reading about it nonetheless. My biggest takeaway, and perhaps the ultimate premise of the book, is that in the US we parent from a culture of fear (or CONTROL as the author puts it) and we need to let our kids experience freedom to learn to be responsible and independent. I will definitely be changing some things in my parenting as a result of this book. I recommend it highly to all American parents!

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I keep reading these parenting-in-other-countries books expecting to come out with insights beyond "It SUCKS to raise a child in America." While I did find some other parts of the book interesting, it's just so infuriating to read about a society that's figured out how to offer reasonable solutions for daycare that it's all I can think about afterwards. I honestly can't believe Sara Zaske and her husband chose to move to the Bay Area after spending so much time raising their children in Berlin.

Achtung Baby covers almost the entirety of parenting, from giving birth to dealing with the teenage years. Zaske is clearly very enamored with the German style of parenting (even though she continually mentions how uncomfortable she is with it at first), so it's hard to get a real sense of how accurate any of this is. Her topics are really broad, too, because she covers so much of a child's life and attempts to segment everything out into themes—for example, there's a chapter on how Germans teach the Holocaust, compared to how American schools choose to teach the more unsavory parts of our history. And her oldest is only in second grade when she moves back to the States, so the later chapters are based on talking to other German parents rather than lived experiences. All of that swirled together means this book is fine. It's probably not required reading for anyone, unless you're as tickled by the names of German parenting books as I am (Jedes Kind Kann Schlafen Lernen!).

Some takeaways:

* Parental leave and benefits are infuriatingly good, of course. All German women receive fully paid prenatal and postnatal care (including regular visits from their midwife postpartum) regardless of citizenship status. There are no out-of-pocket costs. The mothers also control their own health records and receive regular kindergeld money from the government to help with the cost of children. Both parents can take up to three years of partially paid leave and still return to their jobs.

* Every German child from ages one to six is guaranteed a spot at a child-care center. In the book, Zaske pays about $112 per month for daycare (!!). The daycares are generally play-based, and even early elementary school focuses more on social interaction than on academics. German parents put their children into daycare young because they believe it's better for the children to socialize outside their age groups and to build relationships with other adults. Homeschooling is illegal in Germany.

* Children are encouraged to develop independence and self-reliance early. They start biking or walking to school on their own, through Berlin, by first grade, because the schools teach the children how to navigate the city. They play on their own in parks and work out disagreements amongst themselves. Parents avoid telling kids to "stop" or "be careful" because they learn their limits over time.

* Topics such as sex education, nudity, and death are covered as early as elementary school. No parent in Germany avoids the Holocaust (you can't in Berlin, because of the markers all over the city).

* Play is emphasized in early childhood daycare and school and involves the children learning to entertain themselves, particularly outside. (There is no bad weather, only bad clothing!) Because German parents are less worried about constant supervision, their children can and do go outside more frequently than American children.

[Jerzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raises a lot of important questions to consider with my wife as we parent our own kids. I think we'd both like to encourage more independence and resilience, and that's difficult to do in the relatively overprotective bubble of American parenting standards around us, so it's worth seeing some alternatives in Germany.

Much of the life they describe in Berlin is one I'd like for my own kids: a culture where it's the norm for kids to walk to school and playgrounds on their own, and where kids are expected to make friends on their own instead of "controlled access" through parent-arranged playdates. We are lucky to live in a fairly independent-kids part of Pittsburgh right now, but I have no idea what it'll be like after our upcoming move to a new town.

My favorite suggestion was about fire and blades: If kids are going to be fascinated by these things anyway, let's give them a safe place to practice playing with them. Have them light a hundred matches, one after another, when they are still quite young. Do it until the novelty wears off (so they don't hide in a corner to play with matches on their own), and until they are well practiced (so they don't light the house on fire on their own), and make it clear this is something OK to talk about with parents (so they don't pretend it never happened if they *do* start a fire by mistake). Same with knives: give early supervised deliberate practice using sharp knives in the kitchen, to give them that independence and those knife skills before they injure themselves trying to do it alone.

Of course... if you agree with this plan for matches and knives, it's hard not to apply the same argument to sex. If my kids are going to mess around at younger ages than I'd like, at the very least I'd like them to feel comfortable talking to me about it and doing it in a safe environment. Apparently (some) German parents (reluctantly) encourage kids to bring their boyfriends/girlfriends home, do it under their own roof, bring the partner to breakfast the next morning, etc.---it's awkward but at least they're not stuck somewhere far from home if things don't go well, I guess. Sounds reasonable, but I'm sure it's hard to strike the right balance as a parent. Thankfully I have a lot of time left to decide how to approach it before my kids are anywhere near the appropriate age.

Other highlights:

* p.52: One approach to tantrums (which are currently hitting my son pretty hard): "set loving boundaries for your baby as he gets older... I was not to comfort him during his tantrum, but only afterward when he had calmed down. Then I could hug him and even praise him for getting his emotions under control, but the no still stood."
* p.73-4: "We Americans are notorious for wanting to hurry our children's development... Is it a good thing...? The child expert Remo Largo has a favorite proverb... 'The grass doesn't grow faster if you pull it.'"
* p.82: "We can find opportunities to engage our children's curiosity by having them do projects of their own choosing at home. It is a great activity for vacations. My kids love doing projects to this day. They pick the topic and decide the ways they are going to find the information, such as going to the library, asking experts, or maybe taking a trip to a special place like a museum or zoo. ... For better self-discipline and self-control, we can involve children in making the rules of the house---and win an easier road to better behavior that way."
* p.90: I didn't know that homeschooling is illegal in Germany. I like the rationale: "Schools represented society, and it was in the children's interests to become part of that society. The parents' right to provide education did not go so far as to deprive their children of that experience."
* p.110: "toy-free time"---For three months, they [daycare/preschool teachers] took away all the toys... 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... Taking away these external cues for play forces the children to rely on their own internal creativity and on each other. ...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."
* p.112: "Toy-free time at our kita now seemed a bit like waldkitas, day-care centers that are literally located in forests and whose curriculum is focused on natural exploration." Then there's a nice few pages about how the author's son Ozzie has been at loose ends playing alone inside the house, but when his class starts spending more time outside and on forest walks, he becomes quietly focused on the outdoors and really engaged in watching bugs, gathering acorns or rocks, etc. I'd like to give my own kids more time like this, never mind that it may be cold out or they might come back in all muddy.
* p.132: More on that fire-training for kindergarteners, which is called Fascination Fire: "By the end of the workshop, Karawahn has his young charges making their own mini campfires outside and attempting to cook sausages on them. This activity quickly teaches children that making a fire is a social activity, that they need to pair up so one can feed the fire to keep it going while the other one cooks food over it... Although it might seem counterintuitive that insurance agencies would back such an approach, Karawahn says it directly addresses a pattern with fire accidents and young children. Our natural fascination with fire can be so strong that prohibiting children from using it just means they will do it in secret, for example, by lighting matches in their bedroom with the door closed while their parents are busy with something else... In the most tragic cases, instead of calling out for help, young children who've been strictly told never to play with matches are so afraid of getting into trouble, they hide. By the time adults discover the fire, the children can die from lack of oxygen or smoke inhalation."
* p.136: "Real adventures do not have to be spectacular... They have to involve independent initiative, responsibility for oneself, the potential for failure, and the willingness to accept any possible consequences." This is from a section on "adventure playgrounds" and other intentional opportunities for children to engage in risky play, with the idea that they'll learn to identify and manage those risks themselves instead of relying on parents to step in all the time or only playing in sanitized "safe" playgrounds.
* p.140: "Warwitz says that children's 'fear acts as a natural brake.' The really dangerous situations happen when something interferes with that normal instinct; for instance, when other people, such as older kids or adults, pressure children to try something they aren't ready for... this damaging outside pressure often comes from the parents themselves when it comes to organized team sports. Hyman wrote about the phenomenon in his book Until It Hurts: America's Obsession with Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids, showing that the pressure to win from coaches and parents cheering on the sidelines can cause children and teens to play past the point of pain to injury." Another reason I'm not a fan of America's obsession with signing your kids up for organized team sports.
* p.144: Apparently kids are taught in school about the facts of sex pretty early, around age seven. The book mentioned here was Mummy Laid An Egg!.
* p.151: It's also worth talking about death early on. "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."
* p.159: Discussing Germany's approach to teaching students about its WWII past, there's a mention of American high school teacher Ron Jones's social experiment, which he wrote about in "The Third Wave"... "that challenges the notion that the rise of Nazi-like authoritarianism could never happen in today's Germany."
* p.161: Also perhaps worth reading: two sides of the debate about how the Nazis could have come to power. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland "put forth the idea that when regular people are placed in a certain setting, they will generally follow the orders of the designated authority." Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust "contends that it was not that they were ordinary people, but that they were German and part of a long history and toxic culture that hated Jews."
* p.168: "...it's essential to tell young Germans that 'while you have no guilt, you must have a view. You must know what happened, and you have a responsibility to make sure this doesn't happen again.'" I teach statistics, not history, but even there I'd like to do a better job of teaching our future statisticians and data scientists responsibility and reminding them of the historical problems that have been associated with misuse of data or inference.
* p.170: "I see now that if I claim to be American, I need also to claim all the things the United States has done wrong, even before my time. I need to say, 'I'm American. It's partly my fault. It's part of me.' My ancestors and I have benefited from stolen land, forced labor, and a number of historic crimes. As many Germans know, only when we accept this responsibility can we start to move forward to make changes for the better. Even more difficult, I have to talk to my children about these things, and about their responsibility as Americans."

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a terrific book! I loved this. It is more comprehensive in scope than Bringing Up Bebe, and I think the "tough subjects" chapter alone brings it to a higher level. For some reason, I think it's a nice complement to All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior. We are all happier when our society supports self-reliant kids.

[Mythili · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the anthropology-light annoyed me, and the general idea-- that American parents need to stop coddling their kids so much-- is a familiar one, but there's a lot of sensible stuff here and no shortage of concrete examples of how different cultural norms bring out different qualities in kids. Also, her kids' daycare/preschool sounds fantastic. I liked that near the end of the book Zaske took some time to think about how intimately parenting is connected to society-building (and the many forms that work takes).

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look at both the German family dynamic and Germany as a country. There are definitely things I agree with and would like to implement, some of which I unfortunately can't due just to location or living in the states. But a lot of good information and things to keep in mind.
It reminded me of Sarah Moss memoir Names for the Sea but with more of a focus on the raising of children, if you liked that one you may enjoy this one.

[Alieda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking

[Kaitlin Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Get me OUT of America omg

[Samuel Atta-Amponsah · Rating 3 out of 5]

French parents treat toddlers like adults. The Dutch (or maybe it’s the Danes) raise the happiest kids in the world. A Chinese-American tiger strategy prioritizes discipline and ambition over fun.

Ever since journalist Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé hit the best-seller list by telling American moms and dads to stop hiring sitters and just take their toddlers along to fancy restaurants like Parisians do, a rush of cultural anthropology has taken over the parenting-advice industry. It seems like everyone all over the world has ideas on how to be a better parent and the general consensus is “parenting: Americans do it wrong.”

The latest in this series comes out of Germany, my adopted homeland of 13 years, and were fellow American Sara Zaske, a writer who normally covers tech and business topics, spent a few years raising two children beginning in 2008. In Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-reliant Children, Zaske documents her experiences as a mom in a trendy corner of Berlin, a place with the highest birth rate and the largest concentration of young children in the country at the time.

At its heart, the book is a memoir of parenting abroad, but it’s not without a message: American parents should just lighten up already. This might seem unexpected or hypocritical, considering the deeply entrenched stereotypes that both countries hold of each other. Just as we’d expect Germans to be strict authoritarians, Germans would expect American parents to be relaxed, easy-going.

Quite the opposite. An anti-authoritarian movement in Germany in the late 1960s has led to a new generation of parents who, themselves never told nein, are allergic to discipline. In contrast, Americans are seen here as terribly uptight in their parenting, too focused on academics, and constantly hovering over their kids, even well into adulthood. What could we possibly learn from each other?

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The Real Reason You’ll Never Be Able to Parent Like a French Mom
What I’ve Learned From Parenting Abroad
If Zaske’s book is any indication, a lot. Writing about her life as an ex-pat in Berlin’s most gentrified enclave, she highlights the ways that Germans there introduce their kids to the world. From the very simple idea of putting your kids into daycare (93 percent of kids 3 to 5 are enrolled) to the regular outings kindergarten kids take into nature, German ideas of raising children are very child-centric, focused on accommodating their emotional and intellectual growth in a way that fosters a great degree of independence.

Zaske writes about the positive aspects of child-rearing in Germany in a relatable, self-reflective way, noting how she became aware that many of her parenting fears were culturally driven. Chief among them, issues centered on letting go. In short chapters, Zaske focuses on her “achievements,” like letting her young son ride a like-a-bike through the streets of Berlin or her school-aged daughter walk to school alone. These are activities American children don’t typically undertake — at least not at the same age or with as much regularity as urban German children do.

Reading about Zaske’s experiences, I can see why people would be eager to parent in Germany.
From the contrast that Zaske sets up, raising children in Germany sounds very idealistic. When I got pregnant three years after moving to Germany, I felt this rosiness, too. But while I’d thought deeply about my decision to raise a child in Germany, it had less to do with the local parenting style and everything to do with societal structures and supports that enabled me to focus more on my child. Back home, it seemed like every parent I knew made choices purely to avoid financial catastrophe.

Here, I have health insurance that covered 100 percent of my pregnancy and delivery costs. Public insurance will cover my daughter until she turns 18. I was paid two-thirds of my salary to stay home with her for the first 12 months of her life. Insurance even paid for us to do a class together, a baby group combined with an exercise class for new moms. Day-care costs, determined on a sliding-scale basis, max out at 500 Euro monthly for 45 hours of care per week in a public facility. (This is the case for my western hometown of Cologne, which is triple what Zaske says she paid in Berlin, but costs are set by cities, not the state.)

Reading about Zaske’s experiences, I can see why people would be eager to parent in Germany. Though you need to have paid taxes for three years to qualify for a year of parental leave, she enjoyed the same insurance and day-care benefits I did. She was also able to work just part-time, since the cost of living in Germany has remained low enough in some places to allow families to survive, if not thrive, on a single income. Clearly, the social system is set up to better accommodate new parents. In the modern-day, “it takes a village” can work — as long as that village is filled with taxpayers willing to contribute to the next generation in the form of state-supported health care and child care.

But as much as Achtung Baby gets right — and it nails both the immigrant experience and the German culture — the book only briefly touches on the long-term effects of this anti-authoritarian child-focused strategy on both children and their parents (especially mothers). For Americans like me who were raised with working parents, the frequency with which women stay at home here is jaw-dropping. Just 10 percent of couples between 25 and 40 with at least one child both work full-time, and it is rare for the dad to be the one to cut back on his workload. The vast majority of moms who do work after having children do so only part-time, not re-entering the full-time workforce until their children are teenagers. Although many of the moms I know personally are not happy about this, with most viewing it as a step backward into old-fashioned gender roles, only one in five Germans say women with young children should work full-time.

And while the play-based approach to learning might be ideal for young minds, it can feel incompatible with the structure and discipline kids are expected to achieve on their own once they enter elementary school. “Seeing how things are for kids in the 4th and 5th grade compared to the sheltered world they live in from birth to the age of 5 … I find the contrast quite stark and depressing,” said Kim in Cologne, an American mom who is currently navigating the secondary schooling system.

Embracing a child’s self-discovery has another unintended consequence.
After spending the first six years of her life in German daycare with no emphasis on academic skills, Kim’s daughter struggled to keep up with the rigors of elementary school and was recently told she would not get a recommendation to advance to a gymnasium, the high school she’d need to study at before going on to university. The recommendation, which comes after fourth grade, has proven controversial over the last decade. These recommendations are a result of a tracking system that sorts students into college-prep schools or vocational-training education, splitting the population into a two-class system of college-educated “academics” and well-trained “workers” preparing for jobs as auto mechanics, hairstylists, or florists. The pressure on elementary school kids to perform as their future lives depend on it may not start at as young as it does in some places in the U.S. but makes for a significant adjustment for kids who have previously spent their days living in their imaginations.

Embracing a child’s self-discovery has another unintended consequence, according to some: a generation of youngsters lacking common courtesy. As the mother of an 8-year-old boy, Alexandra says she’s noticed that some children are not raised with even the most basic manners. “It’s like the parents are so concerned with looking cool and letting the kids decide for themselves that they brush it off when a kid doesn’t show politeness to adults — or even say hello. They just say, ‘Ach, kids will be kids.’”

Of course, everyone realizes that all parenting strategies have their downsides; there is no ideal way to raise a child. Yet one thing that Zaske makes clear in her book is just how heavily influenced children are in their development by not only their parents but the culture in which they are raised. In that way, she says, the German culture — based very much on meeting fears head-on — has much to draw on. Instead of fearing fire, and banning children from using matches or lighters, Germans introduce children to controlled fires at day-care centers. Instead of adults phoning the police when children are left alone to play in the park, as has happened in the U.S. in recent years, Zaske advocates for a more community-oriented approach that allows kids to explore the outside world without adult supervision, trusting that neighbors will help a child in need.


While Zaske’s advocacy for a more autonomous approach to parenting is contagious — and her fears for her children and honesty about her own neuroses are relatable — her book’s most effective in making American parents think harder about what might actually be shaping their own approach to parenting. For example: As an American without a religious affiliation, I find the religion education requirement in German public schools to be totally against the notion of separating church and state and very invasive. Yet an interview in Zaske’s book shows that most Germans, including atheists, disagree with me. My disbelief over first-graders learning about religion in a public-school classroom mirrors that of German parents when they consider that some American children don’t have access to health care.

These examples, even when they might seem like individual parenting choices — do I send my child to religion class, what do I do with a sick kid — are really more society’s choices, determined by societal standards about how we want to raise our children. Americans, especially, are limited by the constraints of living without institutionalized support. The kind of support that Germans get allow them to take a more hands-off approach to parent. After all, that emergency room visit to fix the broken arm junior gets after falling out of the tree won’t cost them a penny.

[AJ Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook.

I read this mainly to see if the author's experience and portions of my experience would align. All of our kids were born in Germany and we spent our first several years as parents there, though not in Berlin like the author.

The author got the extreme pain of German bureaucracy right (though perhaps even a bit understated, if I'm honest), which was a big thing that drove us from Germany. She covered the pregnancy and birth process, which aligned mostly with ours - though she was lucky enough not to have to deal with German hospitals and give birth at home. And then she covered the years of Kita, which is the farthest we got into the 'parenting system' in Germany. She did cover the positive aspects of the early school years there - the focus on freedom and outdoors and getting messy and learning through play and interaction without a curriculum. I liked that a lot in Germany. I liked the freedom children were given to go out on their own on the trains and to and from school without parents (we never got to that point of course, but witnessed it and I'm a fan). The playgrounds are not boring tiny lands of plastic made for no child over the age of 2. The forests and open areas are prized and begging to be explored. All things I liked about being a parent in Germany.

As for the things I didn't like so much about having young kids there... She did cover one pet peeve I had, right at the beginning of her book, of random strangers giving your tiny children candy or other treats without asking. Or, in our case, one woman taking a chocolate bar and literally placing it in my 18 month old's mouth without even looking at me. I did not like this cultural phenomenon. Not because I was afraid of someone poisoning my kid or whatever, but because you don't know if my kid is allergic to nuts or milk or whatever else, so please ask!! The other thing I disliked, and the author did not cover, was the way people felt really allowed to publicly shame you in Germany, about everything really, but they really loved to comment on how you dressed your baby and if it was appropriate to the weather (I don't care if German parents like to keep their baby in snow suits in the summer, just don't bother me to do the same) or what else you should be doing - not letting your kid walk so much, give them a pacifier, whatever thing else. Keep it to yourself!

Anyway, now that I've gotten that out of my system. This book was fun as a memoir and interesting insight into parenting in another culture. It was meant to be encouragement to American parents to do the same stuff for their kids to encourage independence and self reliance. I'm on board (in America it's pretty much called 'free range parenting'), but unfortunately, the reason these things can work in Germany and in so much of Europe is because society is structured to allow it. The schools are structured to allow freedom and not force 5 year olds to sit in desks for 6 hours day to prepare for standardized tests. Child care is heavily subsidized and affordable for all. No one is going to call the police for you letting your 8 year old walk to the playground or to school alone, or go into a shop to buy bread. America is, unfortunately, not structured the same way as much as I and many others wish it so. So yes, give your kids as much freedom to learn and make mistakes, but the bubble in which that is accepted in America is TINY (and I've only lived in America for 6 months of my parenting journey and already am terrified of what could happen here - not kidnapping or anything, much more mundane things like getting arrested for letting kids play outside, or kid getting hit by car if they tried to walk somewhere because no one stops for people in cross walks or cares to follow the speed limit).

Anyway though, one of my favorite parts of the book was the philosophizing on how Germans teach and embrace their history. Germans, even though the vast majority were not even born by the end of WWII are taught to embrace, own, and learn from their cultural heritage. They aren't taught to ignore it, or say "well, I wasn't there, it has nothing to do with me" it's taught and ingrained. The author then draws the correlation to what if history in the US were taught the same way. What if all Americans were taught to own the history of atrocities committed by the United States, to honor and remember not the war heroes but the innocent victims of what America has done throughout the years. I really liked that line of thinking, and hadn't ever really heard it in those terms before.

So to make a long review even longer, I liked this book quite a lot as a look into another culture, but I don't think it's entirely helpful for parenting in the US - though there are small things in the philosophy of allowing more autonomy and creativity and freedom for kids that I definitely will try harder to implement.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Achtung Baby is part travel-log and part cultural-comparison. It follows the author's family as they move from California to Germany and start raising their kids there. Each chapter is a different phase in her kids' development.



Her second kid was born in Germany, so she goes over what it's like to be pregenant and give birth there. The book then follows her two kids through infancy, preschool (Kita), and elementary school. While her family moved back to the US before her kids could get past elementary school, she also covers what its like for adolescents and teens in Germany. The last chapter covers her return to the states, and the culture shock that she and her kids experienced.



The chapters all have a very similar structure. They begin with a story about the author's experience in Germany, then move to an in-depth exploration of how the chapter's topic is handled in Germany. The author sometimes interviews experts (both German and not), and often quotes various academic studies. The book isn't dry though, and the academic data really does add to understanding. Each chapter finishes with explicit recommendations to parents living in America. These recommendations aren't very prescriptive; they're more suggestions for what to do if you want to raise kids more in the German model (emphasis on if).



One of the major themes of the book is that Germany is the true land of freedom and equality when it comes to raising kids. There's been a recent push in the US against overly invasive and protective parenting, but that push is working against 30 years of Americans treating their kids like they're incapable of handling any freedom. In Germany, parenting culture actively encourages kids to take reasoned risks. Germans learn to handle freedom from a young age.. German parents let their kids take a more active role in their own growth, and give their children more space to explore (even when it's scary for the parents).



One of the things I was struck by is how much German parents seem to have the same feelings of worry as Americans, they just respond to it differently. In the chapter on elementary school, the author describes how almost all German elementary schoolers (past second grade) walk to school without supervision. They even ride buses and subways without supervision, and play in the park without parental oversight. German parents are quoted in the book as saying that of course they worry, but they want their kids to learn responsibility and self-reliance.



Many of the admirable qualities of German parenting are primarily cultural. Parents just have a different idea of how kids develop best. The main cultural difference seems to be that Germans think kids learn responsibility by being given slowly increasing amounts of freedom to explore. Americans seem to think that kids learn responsibility by being told exactly what to do, like you might program a computer to be responsible. In many ways, parenting in this way seems like something that a parent could do anywhere (though maybe less easily without the social support).



Other parts of German parenting are enshrined in law. Kids in Germany are legally protected from corporal punishment of any form (including from parents). Home-schooling is illegal there. And kids have a legal right to learn about various controversial topics (like religion or sex). Not only that, preschools are heavily subsidized in Germany and preschool teachers are a highly credentialed job. These aren't things that you can just decide unilaterally to do when raising your kids, and they make raising kids in the German way more difficult if you don't live in Germany.



Honestly, this book made me want to move to Germany to raise my own kids. I loved the way that Germans treat kids with respect, encourage curiosity, and emphasize freedom and growth (instead of trying to program their kids). That said, I was left wondering how much of this is German-wide, instead of just present in Berlin (where the author lived when researching this book).

[Kate McElfatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was enjoying stories about German parenting, until those stories devolved into the classic parenting book trope of “let’s get back to the good ole days,” with German parenting representing “the good ole days.” If you are trying to determine whether to buy this book, beware that it quickly becomes a comparison between German and American parenting, with German parenting always coming out on top. This would be fine if the author’s opinion was supported by studies, but the author unfortunately makes some huge leaps in logic in order to justify this conclusion. For example, she links the fewer hours today’s youth spend outdoors with an increase in ADD diagnosis, as if she’s never learned the difference between correlation and causation. In another example, she claims that American playgrounds have become “too safe” (after children died on more dangerous equipment), and contributes the lack of children she observed on playgrounds to how much safer they’ve become (as if she’s never heard of observation bias).

I really wanted to like this book, and I truly enjoyed learning about how Germans raise their children. However, that enjoyment was undermined by the author constantly proclaiming the superiority of this parenting style, and especially by her cheap jabs at Americans. Every parent wants to believe that they’ve raised their kids the best way they know how, but it is unnecessary to write a entire book to prove that your parenting style is best.

To clarify, I read this book because I assumed that there were many German parenting strategies to learn from, and there are, but many of the examples go beyond the obvious and into the petty. For example, German children obviously perform better on standardized tests than Americans, but it seems a bit farfetched to argue that Germany’s more dangerous playgrounds are somehow an advantage, or that Americans are stifling their children by walking or driving them to school. The cherry on top is when the author claims that her children’s new American friends all began playing outside and riding bikes due solely to her children’s influence.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

At least half a dozen times during my reading of this book, I turned to the front cover to make sure I had read the subtitle correctly. Surely it was "One American Mother's Experience Raising Her Kids in Berlin," right? But, no. Although it is obvious this is about all Zaske really has qualification to write about, she tries to make this a sweeping commentary on German parenting. True, she makes plenty of disclaimers and tries to build up her case of why her time in Berlin is representative enough to make such broad judgments, but the book would have been better if she had been more honest and less ambitious.

A few of the practices Zaske observes might really be cultural differences between Americans and Germans. It does seem the hyper-vigilance of American parenting is not so extreme in Germany, by and large. However, many of her conclusions about schooling seem dubious. She mentions the many types of elementary schooling options within the German system, but she tries to generalize from her children's experience in a Montessori-style classroom. Well, obviously, you will find typical American schooling different from that.

It was really toward the end of the book that my interest turned from mild to antagonistic. Rather than suggesting to American parents simple things they can do to make their children more self-reliant, she focuses on advocating for government policy changes or writing and demanding changes within children's schools. Ultimately, too, this struck me as another book written by a well-to-do American whose views of "American" parenting are skewed toward the norms of the upper classes. And when she ultimately concludes that Americans need to guarantee their children more rights, as the Germans do, I could only roll my eyes. American children may suffer from many problems, but authoritarian parents limiting their personal rights is hardly top of the list.