Thank you for sharing this. As a father, other parents are my greatest fear. Right now we live in Japan, and I gotta say the way preschoolers are treated here I'm really quite comfortable with (generally relaxed, but calm/sometimes stern talking-to, leaving other parents space, also tons and tons of infrastructure that helps, no helicoptering). I'm really quite concerned about moving back to Europe - while I like the schooling system there better, the helicopter-parenting scares me. My hope is that German-speaking / Swiss culture is still the way I remember, with lots of self-responsibility given at young age, but some stories I hear make me worried.