German Kindergarten Campouts Test Helicopter Parents (2015) | Hacker News Reader

German Kindergarten Campouts Test Helicopter Parents (2015)

wsj.com

105 pointseru101 comments

Brush up your German and see this recent report of a day in a Waldkindergarten... Kindergarten in the forest - which is a popular concept in Germany.

http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Landesschau-Baden-Württemberg/...

The video speaks for itself: It shows a day in the Waldkindergarten of the Sonnenkinder, the 'sun children'. A woman from Canada has her son for the second day there. Another father reports that his son made problems at home and here is busy at any weather. When every child arrived, they walk 20 minutes together to the Waldtheater - the Forest Theater - the green living room. The first group made fire, already - a daily ritual. They also get something to do with various tools. One of the youngest is 2 y 9m and has somebody looking after him. The small children see it as a magical place. It's not allowed to harm the nature. At the end of the day every child has made its own personal experience, they walk back together and are looking forward to the next day in the forest.

This is a thing in Switzerland as well. The waldkrippen are all over the place. It looks like it may be a traditional thing, but I don't know what the history of it really is.

I should also say that at the age of 4 kids are expected to go to kindergarden on their own.

For those who don't feel up to brushing off their German, the NYT also had an article about this in May:

https://nytimes.com/2017/05/18/t-magazine/germany-forest-kin...

Non-native German speakers can probably translate it with services such as Google Translate.

The German Wikipedia entry for Waldkindergarten [1] says its originally from Scandinavia btw:

"Der Waldkindergarten oder Naturkindergarten ist eine Form des Kindergartens, die aus Skandinavien stammt. Im Waldkindergarten erfahren Kinder im Alter zwischen drei und sechs Jahren (teilweise bereits unter drei Jahren) Erziehung, Bildung und Betreuung. Die meisten Aktivitäten finden außerhalb fester Gebäude statt, meistens im Wald."

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldkindergarten

They're also very popular in Denmark, and the rest of Scandinavia.

Description in English: http://denmark.dk/en/meet-the-danes/forest-preschools

And a small documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkiij9dJfcw

An equally significant difference for me, coming from the UK, is that there are men working in childcare. My window overlooks a street where a lot of nursery and primary school groups walk past on their way to the park, and my guess is half the adults are men. I was 9 years old in England when I first had a male teacher.

I can see that hanging out in the forest and building fires etc, would definitely attract me (as a guy) more towards childcare than having to be bored indoors all year.

This is why I think there is strong value in preserving organisations such as the Scouts and Girl Guides. Kids should definitely have these experiences - both boys and girls.

I'm a bit biased, as I was in the scouts for 17 years... In Australia that was Joey Scouts, Cub Scouts, Scouts, Venturer Scouts and Rovers. Theres a group for basically every age.

I feel that years of predatory leaders may have irreversibly damaged the reputation of the organisation though.

> In rule-bound Germany, growing up is surprisingly rule-free.

"Rule-bound" Germany is a common stereotype in the US (and admittedly Germans love ,,Ordnung'') but the US feels far more rule driven.

My son (now adult) grew up back and forth in both the US and Germany. As a very small kid (knowing nothing of politics) he once referred to Germany "the land of freedom" because in the US people were always telling him what not to do.

I had him in a German school in the US for a while. The US parents complained a lot about how dangerous things were (e.g. kindergarteners with access to hammers, nails, hot glue guns and the like).

Age-appropriate hammers, nails, and hot glue guns I hope? Maybe I'm going to become a helicopter parent, but there are hot glue guns I'd want my kindergartener handling, and hot glue guns I wouldn't. Like the difference between a 15w hobby soldering iron, and a 260w heavy duty soldering iron! :)

What's the worst that's going to happen with a hot glue gun? I'm chuckling thinking I may have had negligent parents, but it wasn't too far out of kindergarten that I was allowed to use a soldering iron unsupervised.

Edit: I see that as I was writing my comment, you added an edit about soldering irons. Mine was definitely a big Weller "soldering gun"

Oh, nobody will kill themselves, but my parents had a big 'ol fashioned gun that would give small hands a second degree burn quick if you grabbed it anywhere even near the business end. We used smaller guns that had lower heat output & flow rate.

Nothing wrong with hot tools, but it's nice to limit the severity of the burns while they're learning. A small soldering iron, for example, will hurt but you probably won't do any serious damage. Similar with hammers, a ball peen or mallet will hurt but won't break skin like a claw could.

When I was a kid first learning about electronics by taking them apart and other general tinkering, my dad usually took a hands-off approach but did look over what I was working on. He stepped in a few times; ie when working on power supplies and making sure the capacitors had discharged or when I was helping change oil that it had cooled down. Using practical examples of learning like these had worked really well for me but was disappointed there was almost no direct interaction with tools until 7th grade in my district. Was also rather surprised that a number of my peers never received even semi-formal training on how to drill or hot glue things together.

When I was a child, probably between the ages of 6 to 8, I liked to make model gliders from balsa wood. My father taught me how to cut the balsa wings and fuselage from a plywood template. Once he's seen me do it a couple of times, away I went with the Stanley knife (not sure what else they're called in other parts of the world. Retractable utility knife perhaps) and was making my own gliders. Not sure why, but this day I happened to be kneeling, rather than working at the bench. Sure enough, the knife slipped and embedded itself in my thigh. Three stitches later, I had learned to be really careful with sharp knives and how to cut things more safely.

I've driven a chisel into my finger while trying to finish a mortise and tenon joint. Use a vice, not your hand, to hold the wood. Came close to ripping out an artery while climbing an aluminium fence, just ended up with a nasty scar on the side of my wrist. I took much more care climbing fences after that. Barbed wire fence scars across my legs though. Can't even remember how that happened.

Anyway, kids do stuff and hopefully they learn without killing themselves. A few cuts, scratches, a bit of blood and some stitches seems like par for the course.

I'm just learning to ride a mountain bike, in my mid-30s. I got 3 stitches in my knee last week. It's apparent my confidence has gone too far beyond my skill level, so time to dial it back a little. :)

At my secondary school, someone put hot glue on the back of someone else's hand, leaving a permanent scar. There's always one idiot.

At my secondary school a girl stabbed my hand with the tip of a pencil (which is still there under the skin).

You don’t need hot glue guns to do damage to each-other.

Why did you hold on to the keepsake?

> Age-appropriate hammers, nails, and hot glue guns I hope?

What's age-appropriate? The nails were too big to swallow and the hot glue guns the kind they sell at CVS. The kids cut and poked themselves and learned to be careful.

At summer camp when he was 8 he learned to weld, braise and solder. 12 kids aged 8-10, one instructor. I saw a photo one parent took: instructor helping kid hammer something on an anvil; behind his back a couple of kids kneeling and welding.

Another story I love: when he was 12, my son and his friends found bottle of vodka in the schoolyard. Being 12 year old boys they did the obvious: filled on of the kids' sneakers with the vodka and set fire to it in the schoolyard. Apparently the math teacher walked by and called out "Boys! Class is in 5 minutes!"

What's age-appropriate? The nails were too big to swallow and the hot glue guns the kind they sell at CVS. The kids cut and poked themselves and learned to be careful.

Yup, mostly that. Nobody lost a hand or was rushed to the burn ward.

> Another story I love: when he was 12, my son and his friends found bottle of vodka in the schoolyard. Being 12 year old boys they did the obvious: filled on of the kids' sneakers with the vodka and set fire to it in the schoolyard. Apparently the math teacher walked by and called out "Boys! Class is in 5 minutes!"

I thought the obvious would be that they drank it :D

for twelve year olds it just tastes foul.

Which is just another way to show your group how tough you are. By consumption, unfortunately.

Is that different for 20 year olds?

Im no safety nut, but welding? What type? I wouldnt let a full grown adult use one unsupervised without training. Depending on the form of welding one can do real damage very quickly. Not bumps and bruises. Im talking missing fingers and eyeballs. Or was this propane-powered soldering rather than melting steel?

Can't speak for any GP/OP but I learned simple welding with 12 when my father built a new grid for the berries in our garden to grow, spot welded a few steel grids together (about 8mm thick). Of course my father watched the first 10 tries or so but after he was sure I would be able to handle it he would go do other things and only occasionally check back to make sure I didn't spontaneously die.

It's funny this came up today. This is my five year old: https://photos.app.goo.gl/SkK1T0FZwpx5DeWO2

She was helping me solder together this robot kit. I asked her to wait a minute while I ran downstairs to get my camera. When I came back up, she'd decided to just do it by herself.

Right after I took this photo she yelled "Mommy, Daddy is letting me do something really dangerous all by myself!" :P

I agree with you and the article that youth Germany have open upbringings; however, I do think the German reputation is well earned. Admittedly, I've only been here 2.5 years, but the legal requirements for basic life business and for basic startup activities blow my mind. The specificity and lack of flexibility are astonishing.

in Germany the freedom provided to humans and their capitaland the state, is quiet different from how humans and their children are treated. Like free schools and kindergartens and lax rules on public transport with children and tons of maternity leave, but yeah on the other hand you have to do a ton of work when you want to make a startup. I'd say it's the difference between an entrepreneurial make-or-break-it society like the US and, well, socialism

It's actually capitalism showing that you can sprinkle some socialist ideas on top, and do better than actual socialism at being a "workers' paradise".

I find Germans (or at least Bavarians) are pretty relaxed, friendly and helpful even as they are very tied to their beloved "Ordnung". The result is that things go smoothly when you run along the rails, and even if your run off them, people cheerfully help you back on.

But on those occasions when the bureaucratic requirements get silly, people just accept it. Those requirements are the rails, and you need to run along them.

I was a student in Germany for a semester at a university near Frankfurt, and this was also my experience. It was always pretty clear who you could ask for help, even if their office hours were short and seemly erratic.

Traditionally in Germany the catholics--like in Bavaria--are more relaxed and fun-loving. The real straight-lacers are the protestants and Prussians.

Yes but those are different things.

Germans have very strong sense of behavioural norms that are communicated more subtly.

You don't get such a cohesive culture without fairly strict norms.

In America - you are probably referring to the 'PC rules' which are things that come at you as an adult, they are constantly changing, vague, locale-specific. And it's more of a new phenom.

Also - not sure if kindergartners should be using hammers either :). Maybe tiny ones?

Hammers are fine. I went to German Kindergarten and still have all my appendages.

Correct. In German culture it is frowned up to write "Scheisse" (Shit) but at least you can say it and don't have to write "Sch*sse". Which I personally believe is a silly way to obfuscate the word.

This is awesome.

When I was in second grade, my mom dropped us off for summer camp at a ranch in South Texas. I remember crying and clinging onto her, trying to talk her out of it but she left us anyway and I'm glad she did. We spent the next two weeks riding horses and playing in a muddy swamp and doing leather crafts. When she came back to pick us up, we probably cried twice as hard because we didn't want to leave. The next summer, we stayed for three terms (six weeks).

I hope that this German idea takes root here and an anti-helicopter trend starts in the US. I do everything to raise my two young sons (2 and 5 years) in an environment where they're allowed to take risks but it's tough because this attitude is shared by so few of their friends' parents, even here in deeply red small-town Kansas.

EDIT: Just remembered about the sweet outdoor preschool on Vashon Island in Washington State. Check this out: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/outdoor-preschool-...

I have a feeling it will be a generational thing. It's anecdotal, but I grew up with helicopter parents and have talked to many others who did as well, I've yet to hear anyone speak positively about the experience. Mostly we all got to adulthood and discovered how laughably unprepared we were for basic life tasks. The more successful ones confront it in college and move on, the less successful ones stay in college and promote "safe spaces" to prolong the coddling.

Plenty of us less successful ones simply become immature, dysfunctional adults.

> the less successful ones stay in college and promote "safe spaces" to prolong the coddling.

This is not in any way what a safe space is - stop promoting this completely inaccurate meme to further your own personal viewpoint. It has absolutely nothing to do with being unprepared for "real-life" or some other such nonsense. In fact I'm so confused why you would even bring up such a non-related topic, you must have quite the talent for shifting conversations to your favor.

"In educational institutions, safe space (or safe-space), safer space, and positive space are terms that, as originally intended, were used to indicate that a teacher, educational institution, or student body did not tolerate anti-LGBT violence, harassment or hate speech, thereby creating a safe place for all LGBT students."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-space

(Just to be clear, I have no intention of derailing this thread into the merits of safe spaces - this probably ain't the space. I just felt it was necessary to call out.)

I have upvoted you to cancel the downvotes, since it is right that we see the counter-view about safe-spaces.

But in case you are wondering about the downvotes, it is because you have done the opposite of convince anyone. The tone of your comment seems like over-reaction and is just going to confirm the priors of anyone who doesn't see things your way.

I was not attempting to convince anyone. The above poster claimed that safe spaces were meant to "prolong the coddling" of childhood, yet this directly contradicts the history of creation and specified intention of safe spaces. There is no opinion and thus no "counter-view" to be had about what led to their creation and their creators' intentions as those are facts.

Now one is free to have the opinion that safe spaces stifle discussion, or prevent ideas from being addressed or some other such things - those are all opinions and all views that can have their nuances. But safe spaces were never created to prolong some sense of childhood comfort or safety - like I said, that idea is just a popular meme of the alt-right.

Sounds a lot like scout camp. Look into scouting. There's a lot of bad press about the BSA, but each troop is really very independent, and your local troop may be far more inclusive than you might expect. As a kid we were shooting bows, all kinds of guns, camping, backpacking, roping, fishing, paddling, sailing, firestarting, tomahawk throws, etc... Especially in KS, I have to expect those kinds of parents are around, you just have to find them.

If you don’t want to support the horribly discriminatory national Boy Scouts organization, check out https://www.bpsa-us.org Baden-Powell Service Association which is a far more inclusive organization without all the religious overtones.

Always good to hear from Trump voters how their upbringing never did them any harm.

That was totally unacceptable abuse of a fellow community member. If you post anything this nasty to HN again we will ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Go right ahead.

I don't want to! Your comment history is excellent and we appreciate having you here. It's just that HN users aren't allowed to attack each other, and generally not allowed to import the political battlefield that everywhere else seems to have turned into.

I could have been less aggressive myself in how I expressed that though. It's a constant struggle not to partly reproduce the thing one is criticizing.

Don‘t forget many German parents still engage in helicopter parenting, too. But it is frowned upon by the majority. I for one, as a 6 year old in 1989, was allowed to travel by bike to the next village alone or with friends. I was buying bread at the bakery (about 1km away) and the way home from school as a first grader sometimes took an hour because we were playing at a small river nearby. All without phones. Luckily, I still see really small children walk to school without parents evry day.

"Still" might be the wrong word here. Helicopter parenting is more an issue for the post 2000 years and was never this extreme before.

Considering public transportation, good infrastructure to schools or kindergartens was not really available in the 1980s in many German cities.

E.g. my school was a 6km walk with no busses or trains going there and cars not being a thing affordable by the working class. Nobody batted an eye back then.

Today parents drive their kids to school for 1km. That's just wrong.

> cars not being a thing affordable by the working class

Are you shure you're not talking about the 50s but the 80s?

Maybe they are refering to the east

In the East it wasn't about affordability in price, but about rationing. You had to wait 18 years for a new car at the end.

No, I am referring to the 80s. There were a lot of families without cars there. Probably depends on where you lived but where I lived (500k inhabitants in the city) cars were only for the wealthier.

What's annoying is that as someone who did have a rather free-range childhood, people don't get that there actually were good reasons for people to be helicopter. You let the kids go off and play with others for hours alone, right; but then you find out later that while they did, an older teen was molesting them, or introducing them to porn. You let your kids play and roughhouse, cool; but back then you'd often have your kid chip a tooth or bust their collarbone, or they'd be blacking each others eyes or fighting after school. You'd give them the freedom to be alone, and then they'd be in front of you with the cops by them, because they were throwing rocks at windows.

People need to stop knee-jerk reacting to things and understand trends often happen in context to previous happenings. The helicopter movement arose after we realized in the 70s and 80s that free-range childhood often led to some really dangerous things happening to kids, that unsupervised time actually helped cover up things like sexual abuse or violence. It isn't just millenials being millenial or something.

I do believe that most parents who give their children the time and freedom to grow up are very aware of risks like those you mentioned, but they'd rather take that slim chance than raising a child that, in a way, may be crippled for life.

At the end of the day it's just weighing a bunch of different risks and outcomes against each other. Different people come to different conclusions about "what is best" and there can be no definitely right or wrong approach - not unless people could agree on what they actually wanted to achieve/raise.

Surprise! All of those things can, and do, still happen. Plus, the Internet silently facilitates a lot more of that behaviour despite being in the "safety" of the home.

Citations needed.

It's not the same. Yes, the internet has led to some nasty, new behaviors. But its one thing to have your kid's minecraft server invaded by trolls, it's another to find out your kid was physically beaten up by neighbor kids down the street

Those are not mutually exclusive. It's worse to be systematically hounded online and then subjected to regular bullying.

Seriously this. My wife talks about a very free range early 70s childhood, with the punchline "Of course, one person was molested, and another was killed by a car while free-ranging". We have a Chinese friend who talked about all of kids teaching each other to swim without adult instruction in a (pretty polluted-sounding river). When we made impressed noises, she said "well, of course several children died per year".

This is more of an argument against pollution and cars, and for teaching kids how to properly report any attempts at molestation; than against free-ranging?

Do you have a reference about changes in the amount of molestation, busted collarbones, after-school fights, or porn viewing happening to kids now vs. 40 years ago?

Even if there are such changes, it seems unclear to me that they can be attributed to kids playing outside unsupervised.

But my understanding is that most child molestation is by trusted adults known to the family (or family members), most kids nowadays (certainly by age 12 or 14) have plenty of access to porn (probably much easier than in the past), kids still fight during and after school, and injury rates aren’t especially changed. I could be wrong about though, I haven’t looked up precise figures.

Just making up a list of scary sounding hypothetical situations and anecdotes isn’t the best way to judge risk.

The biggest causes of death for children in the US are cancer, car collisions, drowning, gun homicides, and suicide. If we want to make life safer for children we should be focusing on reducing car use and using traffic engineering to slow cars down (ideally <20 miles/hour) in populated areas, pay more attention to home swimming pools, get rid of guns to the extent possible, and figure out what in the society is making teenagers so unhappy they would want to kill themselves (maybe has something to do with their lack of autonomy).

I don't think anyone really collected that data to compare. I know most of those happened to me, when I was unsupervised, and others I knew. It would make a good project for an academic to collate the data through interviews.

I can guarantee kids watch more porn now at a younger age than they did in the 70’s and 80’s.

Came across a slightly related article earlier today when searching about other stuff: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-par...

A bit too long, but it's making a point of the importance for the "unsafe" plays that modern kids are denied. It claims this is leading to drop in creativity and can lead to increase with mental problems.

Sounds similar to the Scouts. In my country I don't think they accept 4-year-olds, but from 6 they do go camping for a few days without their parents. And at least until four years ago, cellphones were not allowed.

Scouting in The Netherlands includes this, Jong Nederland (Catholic Dutch Youth movement) as well [1]. Source: my anecdotal experience in 90s plus [1] (Dutch entry). Don't remember cellphone policies. It was the 90s...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jong_Nederland

As a European, one of the most annoying tropes in US media is the "orientalism" laissez-faire European parenting; one day we will harness it into a source of perpetual energy.

That's quite interesting. What we repeatedly see in others is an image of ourselves, usually inverted or passed through some transform, but still an image of us. The other doesn't feel seen by this, because they aren't.

Sometimes the other accepts this mirror role because it fits with an image they have of themselves and the other (i.e. you). Then you get an agreement. But it is an agreement of two distortions that happen to be compatible.

These do exist in the US. There's a good list here, although it includes some schools that aren't fully outdoor: https://mamookids.com/blogs/journal/the-ultimate-guide-to-fo...

My girls had a great experience at their forest school. I would recommend it for many kids (but not all, of course)

Can't read the post, because of the paywall, but I have witnessed (almost?) exactly this thing.

Once, when I lived in Germany, a self-inflicted SNAFU had me receiving hospitality from my neighbours, whose young daughter was camped on the living room floor, because she had not been allowed to go to her school's campout. The poor child even got evicted from there, because of me.

On the one hand I thought the parents were being a bit "helicopter". But it also seemed very natural to me. As a South Asian, I find this this is just the way parents usually behave, and always have. And indeed one of the parents in this case was also Asian (though not South Asian).

One big issue for the US would be where to find kindergarten teachers that can/would want to do this as part of their job.

Why would that be? I bet this is the dream environment for a lot of educators. Are you thinking of stric job roles, safety rules etc?

Someone I know used to work in one of those places and wasn’t overly happy. It’s a lot of standing around in the cold, there are a lot more risks you have to watch out for, and some kids simply don’t get it and are quickly bored

Of course they don't get it, they're kids. City dwelling adults pretty much mess up in the wild most of the time.

There are plenty of people who wouldn't mind doing that at all, and plenty more who could get used to it for the right wage.

Based on my experience with day care/preschool in the US, the teachers are not paid well and I think it is unreasonable to find teachers who would be willing to do this extra roll without the tradition of already having done it themselves.

This article is paywalled.

I'm not sure what the appropriate response is to that on HN. I'd probably downvote if I could downvote submissions, but flagging seems unduly harsh.

I found a Chrome extension to bypass the paywall: https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypasspaywall...

Bypassed the paywall for me on Firefox.

The full article is available on archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20171203140509/https://www.wsj.c...

The https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html says pay-walled articles are fine.

I wish HN took a stronger stance on this. It is extremely annoying to get around paywalls on mobile / tablet, where I do 90% of my reading, and you never know before you click.

HN does make the submission source visible, so you can check that before you click. If it's a source you're not familiar with, you might still hit a paywall unexpectedly, but wsj.com (and others, like the Washington Post) come up frequently enough that you generally know before you click through.

Just flag it as paywalled. So I don't hit a paywall "unexpectedly". I'd rather not bother clicking at all.

(Edit: I think I misread what you meant by 'flagging', since on HN that word means a user clicking a "flag" link to report that a submission is bad for HN.)

If you flag stories for that reason you'll eventually lose your flagging rights. HN's policy is: paywalls with workarounds are ok, users can supply workarounds in the threads, but complaints about paywalls and paywall policies are off topic.

The paywalls suck, of course, but banning NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, and all other such publications would suck worse. I realize not everyone agrees with this, but it seems the right call to me, which doesn't mean I like it any more than you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date... if anyone wants to read it.

Your parent may be recommending tagging such articles with [paywall] or some such as opposed to clicking “flag”. It certainly could be worded better. I’d rather not see titles further cluttered, personally. The source already effectively provides that, and additional context.

On a closer reading I think you're right. Edited above. Thanks!

Precisely. Label them with a paywall tag.

The correct way to get past a paywall is to pay. If you don't care enough, just move on. There is enough free stuff on the web.

http://archive.is/2fVwQ

> This article is paywalled.

To quote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989998

> If you prepend "facebook.com/l.php?u=" to a wsj link, it will let you read the full article. Like so:

> http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how...

just prefix the URL with http://facebook.com/l.php?u=

Why does this work?

This simulates an outgoing link from an article shared on Facebook. Apparently, the WSJ has chosen not to paywall articles users get to from Facebook shares.

Spoofing the referer header to a google search also has this effect, and I think that's what the bypass extension I linked does.

It's also what the "web" link on hn lets you do. No crazy add-ons required.

The "web" link does a google search for the headline, which eventually leads to the same result in most cases.

Submitter here: sorry for the paywall. (I didn't notice, because I have some extensions to bypass them.)

Please append (2015) to headline.

Missed that one! Added now, thanks.

Please stop posting paywalled links

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15947417. Workarounds have been posted upthread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com