I live in Germany, too and can confirm. In Hungary, where I'm from, it's no different.
What shocked me most in this article was the paragraph:
> A mom wrote that she had been so encouraged that, at the grocery store, she allowed her son to leave her to get cheese from a different aisle. When he came back, she added, “That boy was six inches taller!”
That mother never allowed her son to do that before before being encouraged by the author? Poor child.
Re:Kids need freedom, too
by daddylongstroke on Friday June 18, 2021 @01:58PM
(#27553026)
I thought that was pretty fucked up as well. My kids are completely free range. When I was 5ish in Poland, I was going to buy bread from a stand about 1.5m away as my daily morning chore. Nobody batted an eye. I loved it, and my mom got her annoying son out of the house for 35 minutes a day: a win-win! Not sure why we infantilize kids in the US.
https://youtu.be/L7-k6nK1VUw
She has a great video. I'm a German also. I did live in the US too. I'd hate to have to raise a kid there.
When I went to Kindergarten in the late 80s / early 90s in East Germany, many kids went home by themselves.
I think it's far more common than that -- actually, guessing wildly, I suspect most children around the world get themselves to school and that the US is the outlier.
In Germany, where I live, and where my oldest will be starting school in two months, it's common and encouraged for kids to walk to school in their first year (age 6). Admittedly, ours is only a quarter mile away. We've just started letting our son go alone to the bakery downstairs and across the street from our apartment, and while it's not quite typical, it's also not wild here for a 5 year old to do that.