The kids over here

 
We had the little man's 4 year checkup today, our first official checkup in Germany. Nils did great - hopped on one foot like a champ, properly identified all the pictures on the vision chart, weighed in at 17 kilos. He named all the colors they asked him to, identified and properly enunciated a slew of pictures, and drew a person.

Actually, there was a problem with the person.

"Draw a person," said the friendly physician's assistant shortly after we got settled in the exam room. Nils pulled a face and poured himself into my lap.

"I don't want to."

He's not a "drawing people" kind of kid. His art, when it is not heavily focused on cutting up paper into tiny pieces and glueing strange things together, is mainly trains, tracks, vehicles, letters, and the occasional ghost. So here we are at the doctor; am I supposed to force him to draw a person?

"Sweetie, just draw a person. Can you draw the head?" I asked, hoping I could help him break down the task into manageable pieces. I got a sad-but-determined shake of the head in response. 

He ended up, after much cajoling and a couple pictures of other things, drawing a blobbish, abstract person. Cool.

Only at the end of the appointment, after the walking on tiptoe and the hearing test, the doctor gave me a stern look. "He needs to draw a person. He did not draw the person properly. Please bring a drawing of a person with you the next time you come to the office."

Really? Really? 

I come across a lot of things like this. You know, a different culture looking at children in a slightly different way.

* I see it when Liv and I go to open gym at our version of the YMCA, and she is the only toddler not running around in a pair of tights. German children must wear tights in the winter. Tights, and apparently only tights. Come on inside! Take off your son's pants! It's tights time! Wait... I'm so confused.

*I see it at Nils's kindergarten (kindergarten being the place you send 3 to 6 year olds) when one little boy falls off a window ledge and spends two days in the hospital. When his parents ask the teachers to create a barrier of some sort, the reply is "the children must learn this on their own. If we put up a barrier, we are keeping them from teaching themselves this lesson." Okay, I actually think that's kind of cool. I also know that German hospitals are really into keeping patients for longer than necessary, so there is more to this story than you might think.

* Again at Nils's kindergarten, there are two beverage options: sparkling water and herbal tea. Nils, back in September when he started, did not drink either of these beverages. Does any three year old drink sparkling water and tea? A teacher approached me a few days after his arrival and asked what we drink at home. "Still water and milk, " I replied, glad that we had solved this mystery together and that my sweet, dehydrated child would now have access to tap water. "Ah," she said with a smile. "He will learn."

(A sidenote here. In October Nils had a small procedure done. No big deal, but he was put out all the same. When the anesthesia wore off and he woke up, we poured him a cup of water from the jug a nurse had placed at his bedside. It was sparkling. Of course.)

*A friend of mine was reading to her daughter in public once, and an older woman approached her. "Don't teach her to read too quickly! It's not good for her." Needless to say, there is no "read aloud to your child 20 minutes a day" campaign here.

All in good fun. I love a lot of things about raising children here. Germans want their children to be independent and autonomous as soon as possible, and I like that. Their kindergartens are also much more low-key than the American counterparts I have seen.

German kids don’t learn to read until they are 7. 7! I read Little House in the Big Woods when I was 6! Nils’s kindergarten has no alphabet on the wall, no “counting to 10” poster posted somewhere prominent.  There is 1 story per day, and oneish art project per week. There aren’t too many toys, either. I looked carefully – there is one doll.  There are no field trips.

The kids are there to socialize. They are there to learn how to function in a group, and how to find their place in it. Teachers are keeping an eye on things, but kids are in charge of sorting out their conflicts more or less alone. There are puzzles and games and toys and such, but they are… props?

Oh good lord, doesn’t that all sound so deliciously German? One doll, a directive to find one’s place in a group, an insistence that a 3 year old solve his own conflict with a 6 year old. (Ve vill not help you!) No, really. Trust me. We love his kindergarten.

What I like the most, I think, is that parents are expected to handle a good deal of the education. You want your kid to take field trips? Take them yourself. The school day ends at 2:30. Want to read more stories? Great. Go get some books. The American / Brooklyn style of schooling would have been great too, but something about this bigger-picture-let's-not-worry-about-the-details German style suits me.  **The alphabet: details!**  It also helps, of course, that I am home right now and can do all those field trips and stories.

Good stuff, I tell you. Good stuff.