German Child Care: Fighting Over the Kinder

GERMAN mothers who take their pundits and politicians seriously have faced a grim choice over the past year. They can be Rabenmütter (raven mothers), who selfishly abandon their toddlers to pursue careers. Or they can be Heimchen am Herd, a phrase that started as the German translation of Charles Dickens’s “The Cricket on the Hearth” and has come to mean housewives passed over by modernity and content to remain at the hearth with the wee ones.This is the latest flare-up in a culture war that has made family policy one of the most contested issues ahead of the general election on September 22nd, shoving aside apparently weightier issues like the future of the euro and the politics of energy. On one side are conservatives, represented by the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister-party of the Christian Democrats (CDU) led by Chancellor Angela Merkel. On the other is almost everybody else.Since August 1st each side has had a policy to tout. Progressives propose a new legal right for parents, once a child is a year old, to have a place at a publicly subsidised crèche. Conservatives counter with a planned new monthly payment of €100 ($ 130), rising to €150 next year, to parents who choose not to use a subsidised crèche, presumably to care for their toddlers at home. Detractors are calling this the “hearth bonus”.These two…

The Economist: Europe