A few months after my middle child turned 3, he came home from his German preschool beaming; he’d learned to light a match. My first reaction was confusion. Was he making this up? Surely playing with fire wasn’t part of my child’s play-based preschool curriculum. But I wasn’t sure — as a 44-year-old American mom in Berlin, I’m constantly confronted with situations that would be considered reckless back home. On one day care tour, I saw toddlers wielding real saws and hammers. Panic surged through me. Could my 3-year-old climb up to the highest shelf in our kitchen and find where we’d hidden our own tools?
The day after my son told me this, I sat in on his class’s morning circle and watched the teachers continue their match-lighting lesson. I was both horrified and fascinated. The children raised their arms, eager for their turn to light a match. The teachers’ instructions were methodical: Never do this alone; hold the match firmly between thumb and finger; light the candle with the flame upright; extinguish it in a bowl of water. Teaching a toddler — especially one who’d consumed a bottle of hand soap just a few months earlier — to play with fire went against every American parenting instinct I had. In Germany, though, it’s part of a pedagogical approach called risky play.
Risky play lets children test their limits, and yes, the occasional bruise or broken bone comes with the territory. But it’s not chaos. Teachers walk kids through safety steps — how to hold a sharp knife properly; how to hold a heavy hammer; how to stop and look before crossing the street — then trust them to do it themselves. It’s not unusual for me to walk into my son’s classroom and see a child slicing apples or cucumbers for the class snack — using a real knife, not a kid-friendly safety knife like the one I bought on Amazon. When a child stumbles, that moment is an integral part of the lesson — a chance to measure danger firsthand. In this way, kids learn their own limits instead of depending on adults to draw every boundary.
Understanding the concept was one thing. Living it felt like quite another.
The first time I climbed behind my oldest son to the top of one of the turrets at his favorite playground, I froze, my heart pounding. There was no safety railing, nothing to stop him from falling 12 feet and breaking a bone — nothing but his own 5-year-old sense of safety. This was a far cry from the plastic play structure with soft rubber flooring that had been down the street from us in Alameda, California. Watching him explore the turret, going close to the edge but not over, was the moment the idea of risky play clicked for me. If I wanted my children to make good decisions, I had to give them space to actually make them.
I knew I’d started to trust the process a few years later, when my oldest, then in second grade, begged me to take him to the store for the newest Ninjago magazine. I didn’t have time, but I needed a loaf of bread for dinner. We’d been there dozens of times together, and I’d already coached him through paying the cashier. I embraced my growing German parenting mindset, took a deep breath, handed him a 10-euro bill, and told him to come right back.
The 12 minutes he was gone were some of the longest of my life. I imagined he’d been kidnapped, somehow got lost (though the store was less than 400 feet away), or had a freak medical accident. When he finally unlocked our front door, he was glowing with pride, recounting every step of his adventure. He told the story four more times that day.
That small errand became a turning point. Soon he was volunteering to fetch groceries for dinner. In third grade, he was walking the half mile to school on his own. It felt like a milestone, but to our German neighbors it was unremarkable — many children here walk to school without their parents in first or second grade.
In the United States, though, my parenting could have landed me in trouble. Around the same time that my oldest started going to school alone, a mother in Georgia was arrested after her 10-year-old son walked unattended to a store.
A recent Harris Poll found that almost half of American kids ages 8 to 12 had never even walked in a different aisle of a store than their parents. If we had stayed in California, I wonder if my kids would be part of that statistic.
The German approach to parenting puts a lot of trust in children, but that trust comes with clear instructions first. If my kids stumble upon a box of matches, they won’t be tempted to sneak off and experiment — they’ve already had the thrill, and they understand the dangers.
Living here has given my children more self-confidence than I imagined possible. Lately I’ve been working with my oldest on navigating the subway system, getting him ready for the day that he can ride it alone. Parenting like this isn’t always comfortable, but seeing the pride and competence in my kids when they walk to school alone, climb impossibly tall playground structures that probably wouldn’t pass U.S. safety codes, or run small errands for the family brings me comfort. They know their own limits, and because of that, they’re safer. These days, all three clamor to light the matches when I set candles for a special dinner, and after they’ve filled a glass of water to snuff out the flame, I let them. Though my fear isn’t entirely gone — I still worry they’ll burn their fingers — it’s mostly been replaced by pride.
Kate R. Chrisman went from reporting in Mongolian coal mines to writing about parenting, culture and life abroad with her three kids. Watch her fumble across Europe on Instagram @katerchrisman.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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