“In addition to park areas designed for them, adolescents can go into almost all places in Berlin, including dance clubs and bars,” Zaske writes. Adolescents are not only indulged in their freewheeling impulses whole parks are specifically set aside for their explorations. Kids aren’t merely encouraged not to be dependent on toys there is a “toy-free” month when no one at the day-care center is allowed to play with them. Nowhere else, it seems, will you find such tightly controlled varieties of freedom, such militarized ordering of open-ended play, such centralized rules for creative anarchy. In her depiction, the new German style of child rearing remains, well, extremely German: here are the most highly organized forms of not being highly organized that have ever existed. And you can wonder whether the German molding system leaves German kids molded quite so thoroughly as Zaske, an American long resident in Berlin, insists. school system and by a tradition of remote parenting that they rebel as bitterly as American adolescents do, only putting off the rebellion until they’re forty, when the sex and drugs really start to kick in. French kids are often sensitive and unspoiled in ways that American kids aren’t they are also often driven so crazy by the enervating 8:30 A.M.-to-4:30 P.M. What’s wrong with such books is not that we can’t learn a lot from other people’s “parenting principles” but that, invariably, you get the problems along with the principles. So why not move eastward through Europe, until we get the book on parenting the Moldavian way? But Sara Zaske’s “ Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children” (Picador) is perhaps an inevitable follow-up to “ Bringing Up Bébé,” that best-selling book about parenting the way the French supposedly do it-basically, as though the kids were little grownups, presumably ready for adultery and erotic appetites.

It was, after all, Teutonic styles of child rearing that were once viewed with disgust-as in “The Sound of Music,” for a long time the most popular of all American movies, with all those over-regimented Trapp kids rescued by wearing the bedroom drapes and singing scales. We know we’ve come to a crossroads when German childhood is being held up as an idealized model for Americans.

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