Yet her book shares some themes with the Europhile ones. In “ Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies” (Knopf), Ann Hulbert seems to be taking up the opposite end of the child-rearing stick rather than ordinary kids with ordinary parents, these are the outliers, right here in America. Until we get to that final destination, we’ll never be apart. The style of middle-class child rearing that the Germans and the French and the rest might help us escape from is really more handcuff than helicopter, with the parent and the child both, like the man and woman agents in a sixties spy movie, shackled to the same valise-in this case, the one that carries not the secret plans for a bomb but the college-admission papers. The helicopter metaphor is an odd one, since helicopters can often only hover, helplessly, as in the Vietnam-era newsreels, as the action goes on below. “There are some rules, including a curfew: teens under sixteen must be out of the clubs and restaurants by ten p.m., those under eighteen must leave by midnight.” (Could these fine-print rules be effectively enforced anywhere except in Germany?) German parents don’t merely not hover they refuse to hover, on considered principle, and send the kids off to school and back, after having digested the odds of a child’s being snatched along the way and, sensibly enough, decided that it’s a safe bet they won’t be.Īnd here we arrive at the real ghost that haunts these books, the one that sends us to Paris or Berlin for help: the sense that American parents have gone radically wrong, making themselves and their kids miserable in the process, by hovering over them like helicopters instead of observing them from a watchtower, at a safe distance. “In addition to park areas designed for them, adolescents can go into almost all places in Berlin, including dance clubs and bars,” Zaske writes. Adolescents are not only indulged in their freewheeling impulses whole parks are specifically set aside for their explorations. Kids aren’t merely encouraged not to be dependent on toys there is a “toy-free” month when no one at the day-care center is allowed to play with them. Nowhere else, it seems, will you find such tightly controlled varieties of freedom, such militarized ordering of open-ended play, such centralized rules for creative anarchy. In her depiction, the new German style of child rearing remains, well, extremely German: here are the most highly organized forms of not being highly organized that have ever existed. And you can wonder whether the German molding system leaves German kids molded quite so thoroughly as Zaske, an American long resident in Berlin, insists. school system and by a tradition of remote parenting that they rebel as bitterly as American adolescents do, only putting off the rebellion until they’re forty, when the sex and drugs really start to kick in. French kids are often sensitive and unspoiled in ways that American kids aren’t they are also often driven so crazy by the enervating 8:30 A.M.-to-4:30 P.M. What’s wrong with such books is not that we can’t learn a lot from other people’s “parenting principles” but that, invariably, you get the problems along with the principles. So why not move eastward through Europe, until we get the book on parenting the Moldavian way? But Sara Zaske’s “ Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children” (Picador) is perhaps an inevitable follow-up to “ Bringing Up Bébé,” that best-selling book about parenting the way the French supposedly do it-basically, as though the kids were little grownups, presumably ready for adultery and erotic appetites. It was, after all, Teutonic styles of child rearing that were once viewed with disgust-as in “The Sound of Music,” for a long time the most popular of all American movies, with all those over-regimented Trapp kids rescued by wearing the bedroom drapes and singing scales.
We know we’ve come to a crossroads when German childhood is being held up as an idealized model for Americans.
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