The Czech Way of Parenting

Allow me to present several scenes of life in Prague.

I teach a 16 year old girl English. We have private lessons, one on one, at a local coffee shop. I've been meeting her weekly for nearly a year now. She was referred to me by my landlady, who is a friend of the family. I have never met with or spoken to her parents; when, at our first meeting, I told my student I would be happy to meet them, she asked, "Why?"

I was recently on the tram going to a lesson. It was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, and we were far from the tourist area, so the tram was pretty empty. As the tram stopped, a small boy got on--probably 8-9 years old--and sat down. Stops came and went, people got on and off, and he still sat there. Eventually, my stop came, and I got off the tram, passing the boy as I went. I realized as I got off that I had only noticed him because he was wearing a Captain America backpack.

Recently, a friend and colleague posted this picture to Facebook.

Photo credit: Andrea Baylis.

There doesn't seem to be anything about this picture that would spark controversy, until you realize that neither of the women pictured has any connection to the children in the stroller. Their mother was in the shop, and she parked her kids outside while she ran in to quickly get something. 

Now, some Americans might be feeling pretty aghast at one or more of these scenarios. Certainly, several of the Americans who saw this picture flipped the eff out--"child endangerment!" and so forth. But for those of us who have lived here for more than a week, it was essentially unnoteworthy--like my young Captain America fan.

There has been, in recent years, a pretty significant divergence between parenting styles in the US and those in most European countries. Google "European Parenting' or "French Parenting" or "German Parenting' and you will find countless articles--essentially identical to one another in message, if not specifics--laying out the European philosophy of child-rearing. In brief: Kids can do a lot on their own, and parents should let them; also, children, even young children, do not need constant attention.

This manifests itself in myriad ways, big and small, but amounts to a pretty stark philosophical difference. What, in the American media, is described as "free-range parenting" is here...just parenting. Those stories of anxious strangers calling the police because a child is playing alone in a park, of parents being threatened with arrest or loss of their kids, are literally unimaginable here. These stories often have elements of class and privilege baked into them--doesn't everything?--but I can't detect much of a difference here in Czechia between children whose parents are wealthy and those whose aren't.

This is not to say Czech parents are of the "speak when you are spoken too, better seen than heard" school. They don't send all their children to some version of the Milford Academy.

Remember when Arrested Development was good?

Czech kids are a vibrant part of life, running around, playing in parks, and yes, riding transit unaccompanied. But their "job" is to learn to navigate the same world adults do, as opposed to existing in a world that has been constructed for them. Parents assume their kids will do so successfully, the kids generally do, and this arrangement gives both of them more freedom than either would have otherwise.

The flipside and logical extension of this is that young children--who really do need some supervision--are often present in what we might think of as "adult" spaces. My same friend and colleague also shared this picture with me:

I...assume they're empty?

That is a photo of strollers lined up at a beer festival. That means that, at a beer festival--where adults are consuming pretty significant quantities of beer in an attempt to get day drunk--there are toddlers about. Last spring, I attended one of the many, many wine festivals held in Prague--again, there were a significant number of children in the 10 and younger range, running around, checking in with tipsy parents as necessary. Were these parents neglectful? Were they scarring their children? Or were they allowing the world of children and the world of adults to co-exist and encouraging their children to learn how to move from one to the other as they age?

I am not a parent, so I would never dare tell anyone else how to raise their kids. But I can say this: if you're even in Czechia and see a young kid alone waiting for the bus, or a baby in a stroller outside a shop, carry on. Try not to freak out--just carry on. Have a beer--it'll help.