Kita II

Apropos of nothing in this post, except maybe lost innocence, how remarkable to go to a Weihnachtsmarkt 
at a hunting lodge in Grunewald and find a roomful of Lucas Cranachs upstairs? 

The shortness of days that you feel at the 52nd parallel—it is pitch-black here at 7:30am—is accentuated by the remarkable shortness of time a parent has to themself when their child goes to Kita. 

I haven't said much about Kita since the early days in September, and much has changed since then. But this week, following a lengthy holiday in the States and the impression it created for J. that every day would now be spent in joyful, constant communion with his parents and many relatives, has felt like a return to those early days, with their wrenching leave-takings and repeated phone-checkings to see how many minutes it will take before the teachers send him home for the day.

Even at their longest, Kita days have yet to exceed five hours. The 9:30 dropoff hasn't changed; there is an 8am muesli club, apparently composed of older children, that J. has yet to be invited to join. The big breakthrough was, after weeks of being picked up at noon (just before lunch), then weeks of 12:30pm pickups (after lunch), the introduction of the Mittagschlaf—nap—which extended the day to 2pm, eventually 2:30pm, where it currently stands.

As a napper, J. presented an intractable case for the Kita teachers, screaming through their attempts to put him down in the Schlafzimmer, an adorable little dorm room with tiny mattresses where all his toddler peers sleep. But when they tried the Kinderwagen, which he had been attracted to from the start, he slept perfectly right away. Later, as a more acceptable long-term solution, they persuaded him to sleep on a sofa in a room where all the older kids, four- and five-year-olds, sleep on mattresses on the floor. This special treatment has been extended a few times in the past, including to one of the now-five-year-olds, who seems well-adjusted and behaves quite attentively towards J.

J.'s partiality to the sofa, incidentally, turned him into an accidental heckler during a pre-Christmas puppet show given at the Kita by a hapless adult performer. After spending the first half of the (admittedly incomprehensible) show playing with a wooden toaster, yelling "toast!" repeatedly to his delight, he moved his attention to the sleep sofa, shouting "nap!" as he eluded our grasp and lunged through the audience, all seated on the floor. He made it halfway to the sofa before Caroline caught him, promptly capping his Puppentheater attendance. It was hard not to take this as a review of the show.

In December, before the holidays, while pushing J. through a Weihnachtsmarkt during one of many days in which he had been sent home sick with barely a sniffle, I calculated how many hours of daycare we had received since starting Kita. Between the acclimation process, holidays, and sick days, the average worked out to 12 hours a week of childcare, or about 2.5 hours a day. While it is lovely to receive these hours for free (or almost free: about $3 a day in fees), their paucity does summon an American thought: you get what you pay for.

Meanwhile, I have seen posts by American parents of tiny infants, horrifying to my sensitive new northern European soul, about sending their three- or six-month-olds to "school," as they sometimes call daycare: children who are still nursing, far from being able to walk or do much besides snuggle, being packed off for nine hours while both parents work! Indeed, this is quite normal in the US, and necessary too, if both parents want to retain their careers and jobs, not to mention pay the several-thousand dollar bill for a service that here costs us 68 Euros a month.

However, if you do want to work here, you are hard-pressed to do it, even with a child in Kita, until your child is at least three or four, at which point the teachers seem to consider it acceptable to take them for a full day. The system here, paradoxically for one based on affordability, kindness to children, and social equity, seems undergirded by a strong presumption that one parent—usually the mother—doesn't really work full-time.

An American visitor, the mother of a friend, suggested rather flamboyantly that Germany's extreme kid-friendliness is an attempt to create a fuzzier, nicer German people, the hard edges of the past smoothed over. Actually, I think the phenomenon is pan-northern European; everything you hear about Swedish or Dutch parenting is similar. Perhaps there is a latitude separating the Kid cultures of Europe from the Adult ones, where children are still ideally seen and not heard, where people dress up and dinner is late...if there are still such places?

For instance, we have heard Paris bashed by several French people in Berlin (a self-selecting group, to be sure, but a large one, similar in size to the population of Americans here), for its unhelpfulness to families, its lack of playgrounds, the chilly attitudes of its older people towards kids. Even a French grandmother we met in a playground agreed with this take, saying she comes to Berlin monthly because she wouldn't wish Paris on her infant grandson.

All of that said, I increasingly find the lines between parents and non-parents frustrating: the way these groups square off in different neighborhoods, the way parents and their non-parent friends stop seeing each other, the way one group considers their stroller rights sacred and the other hates prams to the point of banning them, as the Barn chain of coffee shops pettily did.  I am reminded of how, as a former New Yorker who walked, cycled, and drove a car, I tended to despise cars when I bicycled, bicycles when I drove, and both when I walked. This self-cordoning seems unnecessary: parents were once single and fun, childless people may yet have children (and at any rate, were children once), and each has something to enjoy in the other.