I live in Germany, too and can confirm. In Hungary, where I'm from, it's no different.
What shocked me most in this article was the paragraph:
> A mom wrote that she had been so encouraged that, at the grocery store, she allowed her son to leave her to get cheese from a different aisle. When he came back, she added, “That boy was six inches taller!”
That mother never allowed her son to do that before before being encouraged by the author? Poor child.
I thought that was pretty fucked up as well. My kids are completely free range. When I was 5ish in Poland, I was going to buy bread from a stand about 1.5m away as my daily morning chore. Nobody batted an eye. I loved it, and my mom got her annoying son out of the house for 35 minutes a day: a win-win! Not sure why we infantilize kids in the US.
What shocked me most in this article was the paragraph:
> A mom wrote that she had been so encouraged that, at the grocery store, she allowed her son to leave her to get cheese from a different aisle. When he came back, she added, “That boy was six inches taller!”
That mother never allowed her son to do that before before being encouraged by the author? Poor child.