{"id":8543,"date":"2018-02-23T09:32:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T15:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=8543"},"modified":"2018-02-23T09:57:16","modified_gmt":"2018-02-23T15:57:16","slug":"trust-german-parenting-megan-mcardles-trip-denmark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/02\/trust-german-parenting-megan-mcardles-trip-denmark.html","title":{"rendered":"On trust: German parenting and Megan McArdle’s trip to Denmark"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

We tend to explain \u201chelicopter parents,\u201d or, as I labelled them previously, \u201ctight-leash parents,\u201d with respect to their tendency to drive their kids everywhere, or insist on accompanying them on any venture outside the front door, as the outcome of a fear of kidnapping that set in with the \u201chave you seen me?\u201d milk cartons of the 1980s, convincing a generation of parents that, however safe it might have been for them to roam the neighborhood or the city by themselves, in their own childhoods, the world had now changed and children were at grave risk of an attack by a Man in a White Van the moment they left one\u2019s sight.\u00a0 In prior blog posts, I suggested that<\/a> there\u2019s a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue here:\u00a0 the rise of suburbanization made keeping kids at home easier (a backyard to play in) and sending them out harder (fewer pedestrian\/bike-friendly streets and fewer places to go to).\u00a0 I\u2019d also add that the decline of \u201cneighborhood schools\u201d and the rise of specialized extracurriculars means that kids are more likely to have friends who live across town than a block or two over.\u00a0 I also observed that<\/a>, with respect to the \u201chelicopter\u201d aspect of supervising tightly their in-school and extracurricular achievement, the growth in tuition and the increased importance of merit scholarships, raising the stakes of high school achievement might also play a role.<\/p>\n

But Achtung Baby, which I wrote about yesterday<\/a>, makes a further point:\u00a0 the Germans are more confident with sending their kids out in the world because they have trust that, by and large, the world around them will help them.\u00a0 She cites as an example a young girl who regularly went off to play at the playground across the street from her apartment, then asked strangers to help her cross the street.\u00a0 Parents in general expect, she says, that if a kid has trouble finding their way home, they can rely on the adults around them to help \u2014 in contrast to the American approach of inculcating in children a fear of unknown adults.<\/p>\n

And by happy coincidence, Megan McArdle\u2019s Bloomberg View column<\/a> builds on this, though her topic is Denmark, not Germany, where, she writes, high levels of social welfare provision, social cohesion, and economic success go hand-in-hand with high levels of trust \u2014 in the government, in businesses, and in each other.\u00a0 And trust is the first ingredient, not the result of the others; if you don\u2019t have trust, you can\u2019t achieve the successes that places like Denmark have.\u00a0 (Oddly, though, Germany, despite the author\u2019s observations, only scores at the middle of the pack, among European countries, in terms of Germans\u2019 trust in other people, whereas Denmark ranks at the top.)\u00a0 Really, it\u2019s quite a good article; you should read the whole thing, though it\u2019s long.\u00a0 And it\u2019s got a bit of a tone of valedictory to it, perhaps due to her impending move to the Washington Post, as she concludes:<\/p>\n

Danish business regulations and its welfare state can\u2019t be successfully imported without first learning to trust one another, and to be trustworthy.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s something we\u2019re all going to have to do together. Which means that whatever Danish-style institutions you like, you can\u2019t get them by angrily vilifying the half of the country that disagrees with you. These institutions, it turns out, can\u2019t be built with policy papers or political activism. They can only be built through better interactions with each other, one neighbor at a time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, there\u2019s no clear way to get from here to there, and, for all that politicians like to babble on about \u201cdiversity is our strength,\u201d it seems to me that homogeneous places have greater levels of trust, and we can\u2019t easily replicate that.\u00a0 And it\u2019s entirely possible that in Germany itself, levels of trust and parents\u2019 confidence in their children\u2019s safety have gone down subsequent to the mass migration of Muslims in the last couple years.<\/p>\n

By the way, Megan tells the story of having her phone\/phone-case wallet stolen, receiving a significant amount of assistance from Danes in coping with her situation, and then ultimately receiving the case, driver\u2019s license, and credit cards in the mail from the police when it was recovered (absent the phone itself) a couple weeks later.\u00a0 I also have a lost-wallet story, though I left mine behind at the local grocery store here in my middle-class Chicago suburb, and, before I had even noticed it was gone, a stranger rang the doorbell to return it to me, having found my address via the driver\u2019s license.\u00a0 So that\u2019s something, anyway.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ANyhavn_copenhagen.jpg; By GuoJunjun (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We tend to explain \u201chelicopter parents,\u201d or, as I labelled them previously, \u201ctight-leash parents,\u201d with respect to their tendency to drive their kids everywhere, or insist on accompanying them on any venture outside the front door, as the outcome of a fear of kidnapping that set in with the \u201chave you seen me?\u201d milk cartons […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":8546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[880,17,663],"class_list":["post-8543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-denmark","tag-germany","tag-helicopter-parenting"],"yoast_head":"\nOn trust: German parenting and Megan McArdle's trip to Denmark<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We tend to explain "helicopter parents," or, as I labelled them previously, "tight-leash parents," 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