1. family and parenting
2. children

German Children’s Welfare Between
Economy and Ideology
Karin Jurczyk, Thomas Olk and Helga Zeiher
Introduction1
The objective of this study is to present selected dimensions of child welfare in
contemporary Germany. The study’s argumentation does not apply descriptive
logic, but rather an explicitly analytical perspective. The central thesis is that
the welfare and well-being of children in Germany are influenced to a high
extent by a clear discrepancy between children’s real forms of living (and those
of their immediate family) on one hand, and ideological constructions of ‘a
good childhood’ and the resulting ‘institutional framework’ of children’s lives
on the other. Economic modernisation and policy decisions appear to be
increasingly distancing themselves from the demands and needs of children and
their life worlds. As a result, German society and the German welfare state – in
contrast to the self-conception of the Scandinavian countries, for example – are
considered ‘structurally indifferent’ (Bundesministerium für Familie und
Senioren – BMFuS, 1994) towards children and families. Both the demands of
modern economic life and the basic political-institutional conditions make it
difficult for parents and potential parents to organise their lives with children,
and have a negative effect on the well-being and happiness of children.
The causes of these contradictions between modern children’s lives, on one
hand, and dominant ideologies and institutions in society, on the other hand, are
to be found a long way back in German history. The German welfare state is a
typical representative of the ‘conservative welfare regime’ type according to the
typology of Esping-Andersen (1990). It has been influenced throughout its
historical development – as can be shown for all welfare states of this type – by
the Catholic church and political Catholicism. This, and the experience of
1
Thomas Olk wrote the sections on Introduction, The social situation of children and
families and Childhood in the German welfare state. Karin Jurczyk wrote the section on
Small children’s time and space. Helga Zeiher wrote the section on Schoolchildren’s
activities in time and space.
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
National Socialism, prevented the concept of comprehensive care for citizens
‘from the cradle to the grave’ establishing itself in post-war Germany. Instead,
the welfare state principle is complemented by the principles of solidarity and
subsidiarity. Thus, the welfare state was in fact institutionalised as a mechanism
of social balance; however, it has been understood from the very beginning as
subordinated to both the economy and the private forms of welfare such as
families, extended family networks, etc.
This means, firstly, that the state is traditionally restrained in its interventions into families (see the section on Childhood in the German welfare
state). However, it also means, additionally, that the entire state structure is
typified by characteristics of countervailing power and decentralisation. For
example, the Federal Republic of Germany is a federal state in which the 16
Länder possess a considerable share of political power. For this reason, many
federal laws cannot be passed without the approval of the Upper House – the
‘Bundesrat’. In addition, the political regulation and financing responsibilities
are distributed between the federation, the Länder and the local authorities. This
has serious consequences for children’s welfare. For example, family policy is
determined by the federation, educational policy by the Länder, and policies
concerning social services for children and young people are primarily
determined by local government.
These ‘interlocking policies in the federal state’ lead to considerable regional
differences in important areas of child welfare, e.g. in the school systems or in
the provision of childcare facilities and further social policy-related provisions
for children and families. These regional differences cannot be presented in
detail within this study. In one regard however – that of differences between
eastern and western Germany – regional differences must be taken into account.
From 1949 to 1990, two German states coexisted, characterised by two completely differing policies towards children and families, and thus by differing
societal positions of children. In 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
was integrated into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and the political
and economic system of the FRG was transferred to eastern Germany. As this
study focuses on children’s current situation, we will only make reference to the
GDR past and the phase of transformation after unification in as far as conditions in the former GDR, today’s ‘eastern Germany’, show a particular form of
life situations of children and families due to their different history.
Further factors which cannot be taken into account are possible differences
between urban and rural regions, and the specific situation of migrants. In 2003,
Germany had a population of 82.5 mill. in 375,026 km². With a population
density of 231 inhabitants/km², Germany is at fourth place in the European
comparison, after the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom, and is
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thereby one of Europe’s most densely populated regions.2 In addition, Germany
has effectively been an immigration country for some time, whereby the main
immigrant groups are foreigners and ‘Aussiedler’, emigrants from Germanspeaking regions of eastern Europe.3 The non-German population expanded
from almost 700,000 in 1961 to 7.3 mill. in the year 2000. Additionally, approximately 3 mill. ‘Aussiedler’ have entered the Federal Republic since 1980
(Avenarius et al., 2003). This means that a significant percentage of children
will also be influenced by their migration background in the years to come
(Avenarius et al., 2003: 77). A migration background is assumed when at least
one parent was born outside of Germany. Defined as such, we come to a
migration percentage for the group of 15 year-olds – on which the PISA4 study
provides information – in Germany in the early summer of 2000 of 21.7 per
cent, with a percentage of non-Germans defined by nationality of only 9.3 per
cent, a difference arising from taking naturalised citizens, ‘Aussiedler’ and
asylum seekers and refugees into account. In this respect, there are stark
regional differences. While the percentage of non-Germans among 15 year-olds
in eastern Germany (including Berlin) is only 3.5 per cent, and the percentage
of young people with migration background in this area is 7.6 per cent, the
corresponding comparison values in western Germany are 11.7 per cent (nonGermans) and 27.1 per cent (young people with migration backgrounds).
The following analysis of the living situation and welfare of children draws
on the stock of available secondary statistical material (statistical data, governmental reports, administrational documents etc.) and sociological studies.
Several problems and limitations result from these sources. For example,
although the data situation on the lives of children and the sociological research
situation on children’s welfare has certainly improved over the past few years,
we have repeatedly come across gaps in the data situation and research
desiderata. Also, not all data and sociological studies are focused on the
children’s perspective. Despite these conditions, the following analysis is
oriented towards describing the living situation of children – wherever possible
on the basis of the available data – from the perspective of children, and
selecting the population sector of children as a unit of reference of social
2
Cf. http://www.destatis.de/jahrbuch/jahrtab1.htm.
The most important migrant groups are made up of labour migrants, asylum seekers
and refugees, reunified family members and – unique to Germany – ‘Aussiedler’. This
term refers to German nationals and members of German minorities from the former
areas of the German Reich in eastern and central Europe, and from the former Soviet
Union and its successor states, from Poland and Rumania.
4
PISA is the name of a recent school achievement study comparing OECD nations
(15 year old pupils). German pupils’ relatively bad achievement results as well as a
relatively high impact of social class on German pupils’ achievement results caused
intense public debates (Baumert et al., 2001).
3
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
statistics. Only in those cases in which information from other perspectives
contributes to completing the overall picture are non-child-oriented data sets
and research findings used.
The social situation of children and families5
Germany is lacking in children
Neither an approach focusing on the living conditions and opportunities of
children in the ‘here and now’, nor a perspective concentrating on the reproduction of human capabilities (‘Humanvermögen’) can ignore the basic fact that
the number of children and the relative proportion of the upcoming generation
in the overall population will continue to shrink in the coming decades. This
development is connected with demographic factors such as a low fertility rate,
increasing life expectancy and mobility behaviour. For example, the number of
live births per woman has been below the level that would be necessary to keep
up the structure of the population through the upcoming generation for several
decades.
The fertility rate per woman in Germany has been at 1.4 children for several
decades.6 This fertility rate places Germany in the lower third in comparison to
other industrial countries; only Austria, the Russian Federation and Italy have
lower fertility rates (The World Bank, 2001: 106-108). In the past, increasing
life expectancy and low fertility rates led to the percentage of children among
the overall population decreasing from 27.8 per cent to 18.7 per cent, in the
period from 1950 to 2001. In contrast, the percentage of over 65 year-olds rose
from 9.5 per cent to 17.1 per cent, over the same period. This development will
be continued more intensively in the decades to come. Population prognoses
anticipate that the proportion of children will fall within the coming 50 years,
from 18.7 per cent (2001) to approximately 14.4 per cent in the year 2050
(Statistisches Bundesamt, 2003b).
Although the ratio of birth and death rates has been continuously negative
since the 1970s,7 this development has been obscured by the years with high
fertility rates, and by constantly high immigration rates into the 1990s. As these
5
Thanks to Maksim Hübenthal and Thomas Stimpel for their support in research and
graphic presentation of the data.
6
To reproduce the population in the existing structure by upcoming generations, a
fertility rate of approximately 2.1 children per woman would be necessary. The actual
fertility rate thus causes each following generation to be approximately one third
smaller than the previous generation.
7
Due to the falling fertility rate, deaths exceeded births for the first time in a time of
peace in 1972 (Schwarz, 2002).
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conditions are unlikely to apply in the future, the population will shrink,
initially slowly but from 2020 onwards at an accelerated rate, whereby the
decrease in the population of employable age will take effect earlier, and have
even more serious consequences.
The background to these developments are structural changes in birth patterns.
For example, the reduction of births in the first half of the 20th century, compared
to the preceding century, was mainly due to a reduction in the number of children
born per couple, while the percentage of married couples even increased slightly.
Among those born after 1950, in contrast, we can observe a significant reduction of
marriage frequency, linked with a significant increase in the percentage of women
remaining childless for their entire lives. While the proportion of lifelong childless
women among those born in the 1930s was 10 per cent, it was already at 16 per
cent for those born in 1950, and rose to 33 per cent for women born in 1970 (Birg
and Flöthmann, 1993). The percentage of women remaining childless is above
average for highly qualified women. For example, 42 per cent of women born
between 1962 and 1966 and possessing a university or polytechnic degree will
remain childless for their whole lives, while this figure is at 28 per cent for all
women in western Germany (Grünheid, 2003).8 Studies on young people’s
preferences for having children show that complex processes of weighing up and
biographical decision-making lie behind this development. If we go by the findings
of empirical surveys, a majority of young people under 30 in Germany would still
like to have two or more children (Löhr, 1991). This fact leads us to believe that we
are dealing, in many cases, with processes of postponing having children, which
then eventually end in ‘voluntary’ childlessness. It appears that a growing
discrepancy has emerged in Germany between subjective wishes for a life with
children on one hand, and the economic, political and social conditions of realising
this wish on the other hand, which we will refer to in more detail below.
Children in Germany are at over-proportionate risk of poverty
Since the 1990s, the material situation and the poverty risk of children have
been the subject of an interest unprecedented in the history of the FRG from the
media and the public sphere.9 Until now, older people and (widowed, divorced
8
This difference is less pronounced in eastern Germany. However, forecasts show that
a corresponding development to the rest of the country is also gaining momentum in the
former GDR (Grünheid, 2003).
9
For example, public debate on the Tenth Children’s and Young People’s Report
(BMFSFJ, 1998), which claims to be the first comprehensive children’s report in
Germany, was concentrated on the statements on child poverty laid out on only a few
pages, and led to great controversy between the Christian-Liberal federal government of
the time and the expert commission.
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
and/or single) women were regarded as at risk of poverty; children were thought
to be materially relatively well secured in this respect. However, sociological
poverty research has been pointing out a shift of poverty risk since the late
1980s, away from the traditional risk groups – such as older people, for
example – to children and young people – or specific family arrangements with
children – and coined the rather unfortunate term of ‘infantilisation of poverty’
to refer to the phenomenon (Hauser and Voges, 1999). These problem diagnoses were vehemently rejected, with reference to the unclear and controversial
status of the poverty definitions applied, and the supposedly limited significance
of deprivation in countries with high standards of living (Krämer, 2000). If we
work on the basis of a relative concept of poverty, then it is true that the FRG is
ranked in the mid-field in a comparison of frequency of child poverty in western
countries; according to the well-regarded UNICEF study, 10.7 per cent of
children in Germany were living in relative poverty in the mid 1990s, while the
entire spectrum ranges from 2.6 per cent in Sweden to 22.4 per cent in the USA
(UNICEF, 2000).
Overall, in an international comparison Germany is a country with a high
material standard of living. According to the findings of the Income and Consumption Survey (EVS), the average household income in western Germany
showed a growth of 20.5 per cent in real terms from 1973 to 1998. In eastern
Germany, net income showed an increase in real terms of 9.6 per cent between
1993 and 1998 (BMAuS, 2001: XVI). However, income and wealth are (also)
unequally distributed in Germany, and this inequality has increased over the
past decades. On the basis of data from the EVS survey, Becker and Hauser
(2003: 33) illustrate that both the poverty and the wealth rate have risen in
western Germany in the period since 1973. The growth of the poverty rate was
even more pronounced than that of the wealth rate; the former rate rose by two
thirds – from 6.5 per cent in 1973 to 10.9 per cent in 1998, whereby this
increase took place at the end of the 1970s.
However, the individual age groups were affected differently by this
development. For children under 14 years, there are over-proportionate poverty
rates at all times of the surveys, and also above average increases in poverty
frequency.10 Child poverty is thus not a new problem, but rather an intensifying
problem also increasingly affecting young people and young adults. In 1998,
approximately every 6th child in western Germany was living on less than half
10
At this point, we must point out that the equivalence scale used in each measurement
of the scope of child poverty is of great significance. Depending on which needs
weightings are ascribed to further household members and children, different poverty
rates are established. A high needs weighting for children leads to an increase in poverty
frequency of children and households with many children, while low needs weightings
have the opposite effect (cf. e.g. Faik, 1997).
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of the average net equivalent income. In contrast to the general trend, only the
poverty rates of the two oldest groups initially fell, only to rise again at a later
point.11
At the other end of the income distribution scale – that is, in the ‘higher
income bracket’12 – children and young people in particular, but also older
people are underrepresented, while people in the central working age and an
increasing number of 55 to 64 year-olds are over-proportionately represented.
As well as registering poverty by relative poverty measures, we can also
make use of the political definition of poverty when carrying out empirical
poverty measurements. This uses the level at which public assistance is payable
according to the Federal Public Assistance Act (BSHG) as a benchmark. Households and individuals falling below this threshold receive ‘continuous subsistence payments’ (HLU), according to the BSHG. Many analysts therefore refer
to ‘combated poverty’ in this context. Population groups who rely on this form
of state support are registered in the official public assistance statistics.13 The
public assistance statistics also show an increase in the number of children
affected by this form of politically defined ‘combated poverty’.
The younger a child in Germany is, the greater is the probability that it lives
in a family claiming public assistance. To explain this phenomenon: more than
half of children claiming public assistance live in households with lone mothers,
while just under a third live in family households in which married couples live
with children. While children and young people of school age are particularly
affected in the married couple households, toddlers and pre-school children are
particularly frequently represented in lone parent households claiming public
assistance (Federal Statistical Office Germany, 2004).
11
A such over-proportionate frequency of poverty among children can also be proved
on the basis of other data sets. For example, Bacher and Wenzig (2002) come to the
conclusion on the basis of the data of the Socio-Economic Panel (1999) that the risk of
poverty in western Germany in 1999 was almost twice as high for children than for
adults. They calculate a relation of 2.4 for eastern Germany (Bacher and Wenzig, 2002:
119). According to their analyses, the risk of poverty is linked with variables such as
lone parent families, households with three or more adults, number of unemployed in
the household, educational level and number of siblings.
12
The higher income bracket is defined as 200 per cent and above of the arithmetic
mean average of the net equivalent income (Becker and Hauser, 2003: 35).
13
However, public assistance is only of limited use for measuring poverty, in that only
those people affected by poverty can be registered who claim support payments. Lowincome individuals who do not claim public assistance, although they would be legally
entitled to benefits, that is the ‘hidden poor’, are not registered using this procedure
(Neumann and Hertz, 1998).
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
Figure 1. Children in the public assistance statistics – percentage of the respective
population group of the same age.
10
8
All minors
under 7 year-olds
7 to 11 year-olds
11 to 15 year-olds
15 to 18 year-olds
percent
per cent
6
4
2
0
1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002
Source: Federal Statistical Office Germany, 2004; public assistance data have no
longer been analysed separately for eastern and western Germany since 2002.
Figure 2 shows the divergence of poverty and wealth rates for the younger
generation, in comparison to those of the medium and older population groups
in western Germany. As comparison lines, the corresponding rates for the overall population are shown.14 The diagram shows that the wealth rate of children
and young adults up to 24 years has remained slightly further behind the overall
development over the time period, while the poverty rate of the younger
generation has exceeded the generally rising trend. Of this development to the
disadvantage of children we can observe a slight weakening in the phase from
1993 to 1998, which results from the improvement of the child benefit package
(‘Familienlastenausgleich’) introduced in phases since 1993 (tax exemption of
the minimum standard of living, particularly a significant increase in child
benefit in 1996). However, other developments (such as the rise in unemployment rates, low collective wage agreements, reduction of bonuses above the
collectively agreed level, etc.) have cancelled out these improvements. The
result is that age-specific poverty rates have not fallen significantly, despite
improvements in family policy (Becker and Hauser, 2003: 35).
14
The wealth rate for all individuals up to and including 24 years was compiled
together, as the rates for the sub-groups are similar.
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Figure 2. Development of the poverty and wealth rates* of the respective young
generation (under 25 years) in western Germany**, 1973 to 1998.
18
Poverty/wealth rate (in %)
16
14
Poverty 0-6 y.
Poverty 7-13 y.
Poverty 14-17 y.
Poverty 18-24 y.
Poverty total
Wealth total
Wealth 0-24 y.
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
1973
1978
1983
1988
1993
1998
Year
* Poverty threshold: 50 percent of the arithmetical mean average of net equivalent
income. Wealth treshold: 200 percent of the arithmetical mean average of net equivalent
income.
**Excluding households with non-German heads.
Source: Becker and Hauser, 2003: 35.
Overall, we can make the following summary: while a rather decreasing group of
children certainly profits from their parents’ growing wealth, increasing income
inequality and growing poverty rates have contributed to a relative deterioration
of the overall material situation of children. Children in both western and eastern
Germany are over-proportionately affected by relative poverty and precarious
wealth, whereby this does not apply to all children to the same extent. Demographic factors such as the type of family (particularly lone parent families and
families with many children), the number of unemployed or inactive adults in the
household and the educational level of the parents or guardians are decisive for
the concrete material situation and/or poverty of households.
Independent of the concrete material situation of the household in which
children live, they may have their own more or less direct sources of money.
They thus act as (potential) consumers on consumer markets and are correspondingly targeted by advertising. One important source of money from parents to
children is pocket money. This is given by parents for educational reasons as a
rule, so that children can learn to deal with money independently. In an
empirical survey of parents in 1997, it emerged that 80 per cent of all those
interviewed paid their children regular pocket money, four per cent paid this
regular pocket money depending on specific conditions (school marks, help in
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
the household) and 16 per cent did not pay their children regular pocket money,
but instead gave them money when they needed it (Rosendorfer, 2000: 47).
Regular pocket money is paid more often in higher social classes than in lower
classes, a fact which is particularly significant for those interviewed in the
western part of Germany. Further, a higher proportion of west German parents
give regular pocket money (83 per cent) than of east Germans interviewed (72
per cent). If funds are short in a household, children more frequently receive
money when they need it.
The level of pocket money varies considerably within the individual age
groups. According to the survey, the majority of 10 to 11 year-olds receives a
monthly amount; on an average of 10 ± 5 Euro. The group of 12 to 13 year-olds
receives an average of 15 ± 8 Euro, the 14 to 15 year-olds receive 21 ± 9 Euro
and the oldest group of 16 to 17 year-olds is paid 37 ± 24 Euro (Table 1). The
amount of pocket money paid is not linked to income or social class.
Predictably, most children and young people receive further money from other
sources, the amount of which also rises with increasing age. Table 1 shows that
help around the household is rewarded as a special activity for boys in particular, while it tends to be naturally expected of girls.
With increasing age, the number of children earning their own additional
money rises continually (see section on The power of school on children’s
time). This corresponds to increasing income from part time jobs (Table 1). The
amount of monthly additional income is between 1 Euro and 720 Euro, whereby
this figure is also dependent on age. Boys and girls earn approximately the same
amount and there are no east/west differences in the level of earnings.
Table 1. Average monthly amount from various sources of money, 1997.
Age groups
12-13 14-15
16-17
Source of Money
years years
years
Amount in Euro
Pocket money
10
15
21
37
Money from part time jobs
3
17
41
77
Money as gifts
7
11
12
15
Money for helping in the household
3
5
7
10
Money for good school marks
4
5
6
7
Source: Deutsches Jugendinstitut — DJI survey ‘Children and Money’, 1997, in:
Rosendorfer, T. 2000: 51, (rounded figures).
10-11
years
Six per cent of young people in the families interviewed in eastern and western
Germany already have their own income, the majority in the form of payment
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for a traineeship. The amount of own income varies between 77 Euro and 920
Euro per month, whereby most young people earn between 255 Euro and 410
Euro. One third of the young people pay some of the money they earn towards
the household, on average approximately 72 Euro per month. Money given as
gifts – particularly for birthdays and Christmas – also plays a significant role.
The level of these annual gifts of money can amount to up to 3700 Euro.
The fact that some children do not receive pocket money at all is not
necessarily an indicator of poverty or low income of the family household (Feil,
2003: 48). On the contrary, more detailed analyses show that the largest per
centage of children receiving money sporadically or not at all belongs to the age
group of 6 to 8 year-olds. Some parents obviously start giving pocket money
later. Overall, the available empirical studies show that the percentage of
children from low-income families who do not get pocket money at all is at the
average level for society. According to Feil (2003: 52), this is an expression of
the fact that a certain group of low-income parents finds it important to pay
their children pocket money so as not to disadvantage them, and to avoid them
employing illegitimate means of satisfying their wishes. It is further supposed
that parents with low income motivate their children to gain relative financial
independence through their own work at an earlier point.
According to private sector consumer analyses, the ‘total income’ of 6 to 17
year-olds thus coming into being in the year 2000 amounts to approximately 5
mill. Euro (Feil, 2003: 78). It is difficult to prove whether this sum has increased over the past few years, as is assumed in the debate on the subject,
using the empirical findings available.15 The importance of children as actors on
consumer markets is certainly not, however, limited to them spending the sums
of money directly available to them. In fact, they exercise a considerable influence on their parents’ purchase choices.16 The area of consumer goods over
which children exercise influence includes both non-durable goods such as food
and body care products, and durables from the areas of clothing, electronic
equipment, household and home equipment, cars, games and leisure. Such
goods are bought by parents for children, the household or the whole family.
Corresponding consumer surveys show that children’s influence is greater, the
more children-specific the products named in the survey are. It further emerges
that children show better product knowledge and brand awareness than their
parents in certain product divisions (e.g. for selected food goods, but also for
leisure products, in the computer sector and for entertainment electronics).
However, we should not overestimate children’s purchasing influence. The
15
We must take into account that not all of the total is spent on the consumer markets
during the year, but a considerable amount of this money is saved.
16
For this reason, private sector studies of the economic role of children differentiate
between direct and indirect purchasing power (Feil, 2003: 77).
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
empirical findings show that parents do have conversations with their children
about financial matters as a rule, but only one sixth of those interviewed stated
that children are allowed to join in decisions on larger purchases for the family.
Even in the case of larger purchases for children, parents reserve the right to
make the purchase decision themselves (Rosendorfer, 2000: 83; also Feil, 2003:
101-103). Overall, we can infer that in the modern family ‘as a negotiation
household’, children do partly influence purchase decisions, but these decisions
must be understood as the result of the interplay of the differing preferences of
all members of the family.
Childhood in the German welfare state
Child and family policy in the period of reconstruction
The foundations for the specific position of children and families in German
society were laid directly after the Second World War. During this phase of
development, which one could also describe as the ‘golden years’ of the
bourgeois family model, the private forms of family life and the institutional
framework, as it was structured by the policy of the time, appeared to match
perfectly. The child and family policy of the time followed guidelines considered a fundamental alternative to both the child and family policy of the
National Socialist state and to those of the GDR. The aim was to institutionalise
marriage and the family as sectors of the private sphere with their own logic,
removed from state intervention. The social conservative policy of the Adenauer era was concerned with the protection and promotion of the family as an
institution (Bast and Ostner, 1992; Münch, 1990: 160).
Family policy abstained from any form of intervention in the internal matters
of the family, restricting itself to additional measures of the promotion of families, such as supporting property and home-owning, transport policy and
especially spreading family-related rhetoric. The state was to deal with economic assistance payments in an extremely reserved manner and every openly
proclaimed pro-natalistic programme and policy was taboo, in view of the
experiences with the National Socialist state’s intervention in the family.17 As
17
The state’s reservation was also expressed in the low level and the institutional
structure of the first child benefit regulations of 1954. Child benefit was only provided
from the 3rd child on. This child benefit was financed exclusively by the employer side
and paid by ‘Familienausgleichskassen’ as self-administrative organs, in order to avoid
a direct financial payment to families by the state. Since the child benefit act of 1954,
economic support of children and families has mainly taken place according to the
principle of the ‘dual system’ of financial support for families, which is based on a
combination of tax-free allowances and child benefit payments.
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raising children was considered an ancient natural task of the parents, any form
of childcare above the level of half-day nurseries (for children of at least 3) and
half-day schools was seen as an illegitimate form of ‘nationalisation’ of childrearing.
In accordance with this family ideal, employment, social and family policy
applied in the German welfare state in the 1950s and 1960s was oriented
towards the ‘strong male breadwinner model’.
In taxation law for example, joint tax assessment for married couples
ensured (and continues to ensure) a significant privileged status for the singleearner marriage, or at best for the additional earner model. According to the
regulations valid since 1958, the income of both partners is initially added
together, and then halved to calculate the tax due. The tax due on the halfincome is finally multiplied by two. This form of taxation has the result that tax
savings compared to singly assessed taxpayers are greater, the higher the
income and the income difference. A married couple in which only one partner
is in paid employment thus has the highest tax advantages.
Ironically, the result of this Christian-conservative societal policy was not
the recreation of the old German family (as a family of multiple children and
multiple generations), but instead the spread of the modern family as described
by Parsons (Bast and Ostner, 1992: 253). The accumulated marriage rates
reached their highest levels in the 1950s and 1960s (Huinink, 1995: 218) and
the net fertility rate increased again after the war, exceeding the necessary value
of 1 to maintain the population for the first time in 1957, only to further exceed
this level up until the mid-1960s (Huinink, 1995: 237). Under these conditions,
the specific performance potential of this form of family reached its peak.
Through the broad freeing up of wives and mothers for family-related tasks,
expressed not least in the relatively low rate of mothers’ employment, it became
possible to individualise the task of raising and caring for children to an
unprecedented extent, as the care ratio in families rarely exceeded a level of 1:3
(Bertram, 1998). Closely linked to this development was a gradually beginning
displacement of children from public spaces and their enclosure in the domestic
space of family living communities (familisation of childhood). Using the
welfare state typology of Esping-Andersen (1990) as a basis, the German
welfare state in fact proved to be a prototype of the social-conservative welfare
state regime, with its propagation of the male breadwinner/housewife family,
the delegation of the tasks of raising children to families and the extensive
reservation concerning family-related legal and monetary intervention in the
1950s and 1960s.
715
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
Family policy enters the 1980s
In the course of the transition to the Christian-Liberal coalition under chancellor
Helmut Kohl in 1982, a renewed paradigm shift took place in German policy
towards children and families. Against the backdrop of an economic growth
crisis, rising unemployment and increasingly tangible financing shortages in
public budgets, the Kohl government implemented selective consolidation measures in various social security systems on one hand, and adopted a course of
expansion in the area of family policy on the other hand. The new course in
family policy, which can certainly be placed in line in the ‘tradition of great
social reforms’ (Schmidt, 1998: 105), included both the gradual expansion of
financial support for families, and completely new elements such as the
introduction of the three ‘Ps’, i.e. parental benefit, parental leave and parental
periods in pension insurance (Münch, 1990: 172).
The introduction of parental benefit and parental leave in particular was
intended to place family and paid work on an equal footing, and improve the
freedom of choice between family and paid employment both for women and
for men. Mothers and fathers were to be able to make a free choice of whether
and how long they wanted to exit paid employment for the purpose of raising
children.18
The Social Democrats had criticised these regulations strongly from the very
beginning, as they feared a conservation of the traditional female role model,
with the result that women would be displaced from the labour market. In fact,
parental leave was, and still is, almost exclusively – in over 90 per cent of
cases – taken up by mothers. However, this is primarily a result of the too low
calculation of parental benefit, compared to wages and salaries earned on the
labour market. As husbands tend to earn more than their wives, it is usually the
woman who gives up her working income and takes parental leave, for purely
financial reasons.19 So, although the political intention of the Christian-Liberal
coalition was to increase freedom of choice, the concrete form of the regulations
ended up re-cementing the traditional gender-specific division of labour.
Additionally, the Christian-Liberal coalition introduced the recognition of
periods of intensive child-rearing in pension rights, through the Survivors’
Pensions and Child Rearing Benefits Law (HEZG) of 1985. These periods of
intensive child-rearing were intended to supplement parental leave and parental
18
During parental leave, part time employment of up to 19 hours per week was
allowed. No previous employment was necessary to claim parental benefit. An employment guarantee was given by the old employer for the length of the parental leave.
19
Further, an interruption of a working career has always been linked with further
disadvantages and problems. These concern both the chances for an adequate re-entry
onto the labour market, and also missed career advancement and pay rises normally
connected with continuous career courses.
716
COST A19: Germany
benefit in long term social security, so that parents who have devoted themselves to raising children, and given up paid work to do so, do not have to fear
excessive losses to their pension rights.
During the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, the child and family
policy debate was given a completely new impetus by societal and political
influences. In this context, we must refer to the fall of the GDR regime and the
German unification it made possible. In the course of the transformation process
of eastern Germany, western institutions were transferred to eastern Germany
more or less one-to-one. However, the family and child policy regulations of the
GDR, such as the extensive legal equality of women, the high level of labour
market integration of women and mothers, the generous financial provisions for
mothers and children and young families, and the extensive system of public
childcare, from crèches to after-school care, were regarded as superior to the
western institutions and provisions. When the much more liberal abortion laws
of the GDR had to be adjusted to the new unified German constitutional reality
in the early 1990s, it was possible, in view of these influences of east German
‘achievements’ on the west German debate, to push through a statutory
entitlement to a half-day childcare placement for children between the ages of 3
and 6 years in 1992, after long discussions (Hauser et al., 1996: 88).
We can see a further impetus for child and family policy discussion in the
1990s in the discovery of the ‘productive value’ of family work for society as a
whole. Material disadvantages and losses connected with the decision to start a
family, and the growing risk of poverty of children – or of specific family
arrangements with children (infantilisation of poverty; cf. the section on The
social situation of children and families) – led ever more frequently to public
criticism of the insufficient state provisions for children and families.20 In this
situation, the Fifth Family Report (BMFuS, 1994) pointed out the specific
contribution made by families towards the production and reproduction of
‘human capabilities’ (‘Humanvermögen’). The central message of this report’s
argumentation was that families create ‘positive external effects’ in carrying out
their everyday lives, from which all other societal subsystems – the economy,
social security, politics, etc. – profit. From a perspective of comprehensive
economics, such positive effects of family production are not only the quantitative
reproduction of the population and the securing of the following generation, but
20
From the late 1980s on, the federal constitutional court exercised a serious influence
on political decisions in the area of child and family policy, through a serious of
contentious rulings. We cannot go into this development in detail within this report
(Gerlach, 2000). However, particularly with respect to the financial support for families,
we can establish in hindsight over the last 15 years that the respective governments in
power were forced to implement continuous further development of provisions for
children and families by the rulings of the federal constitutional court.
717
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
particularly the creation and development of ‘human capabilities’ by raising
children. As this production appeared to be no longer kept up in a natural way and
without problems in the course of the pursuit of happiness and wealth of potential
parents, the state was called for to create more positive basic conditions.
From a child policy perspective, it is remarkable that the fact that birth rates
are falling and children are thereby becoming ‘scarce’ in modern societies did
not lead to a direct improvement of the social status and the material situation of
children in Germany, but rather to an honouration of the value of parents’ childrearing activities. Thus, children’s own contribution, both to family welfare
production and to self-socialisation and self-qualification, takes second place,
from the political point of view, to the exclusive recognition of parents’ childrearing activities (Olk and Mierendorff, 1998).
The practical result of this discussion was gradual improvements of financial
provisions and tax relief within the ‘dual system’ of financial support for
families in 1982, which were, however, unable to keep up with the increasing
costs of living and of bringing up children overall. In view of this fact, the
system of financial support for families was reformed once again in 1996
(Lampert, 1996: 166). Child allowance and child tax credit were greatly increased again, however the ‘dual system’ was abolished to the extent that
potential claimants now had to decide between the two options, depending on
which was more beneficial to them. The decisive improvement of provisions by
the new regulations can be seen particularly in the fact that child allowance was
not only raised from the third child on, but for the first and second child, to 102
Euro per child in 1996 and 112 Euro per child in 1997, so that the majority of
families with up to two children is among those benefited. Overall, although
these new laws improved the situation of low-income families, the relative
material disadvantages of families with children compared to couples without
children remained in existence to a great extent.
We can also recognise the strongly pronounced familyism and conservatism
in German child and family policy in the fact that it has been impossible to date
to promote child-based policies and measures against the dominance of family
policy, despite impulses and positive examples from other European countries
(Mierendorff and Olk, 2003). Since the late 1970s, we have seen indications of
transformation processes in this regard, which were reflected in the political
arena in the development of new perspectives and approaches to a policy for
children. For example, in 1988 a children’s commission was set up as part of
the German parliament, children’s Ombudsmen have appointed in many local
authorities, and the participation of children and young people in schools,
Kindergartens and similar institutions has improved. On a legal regulation level,
above all the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child of 1989, ratified in the
FRG in 1991 – with restrictions – led to many different efforts to strengthen
both the legal position of children and also the measures and policies for
718
COST A19: Germany
children. Nevertheless, the necessity of an independent children-based policy is
stubbornly questioned both in the public discourse and on the federal political
level. Particularly from a family policy point of view, it is argued that an
independent childhood policy constructs an unnecessary clash of interests
between children and their parents, thereby damaging children in their development chances more than benefiting them.
Policy for children and families under the ‘Red-Green’ coalition
from 1998 to 2002
The SPD-Green Party government essentially extended the financial support for
families in their first legislatory period from 1998 to 2002, through a total of
three increases in child benefit and the introduction of further tax allowances
(Bleses, 2003). Alongside these measures, parental leave was converted to the
‘parenting period’.21 With the new possibilities of taking simultaneous parental
leave and the raised threshold of permitted working hours during the parenting
period, it is easier for fathers and mothers to remain more strongly anchored on
the labour market, even while rearing young children. The new parenting period
thereby already paves the way towards improved compatibility of family and
paid work for both parents. Further, the inclusion of periods of intensive childrearing in pension insurance was further extended retroactively as of January
2002, back to 1992. The survivors’ pensions were also changed so as to favour
parents over childless insured parties.
The ‘Red-Green’ coalition government had not left the previous developmental path of transfer-based family and child policy. This had the result that
financial transfers significantly outweigh transfers in kind, in the form of
services, in German child and family policy, in comparison to other European
countries.22 The incentive and control effects of this transfer-oriented family
21
From now on, parents can take parental leave jointly for up to three years, whereby
they are allowed to carry out paid work of up to 30 hours, rather than the previous 19
hours. With the agreement of the employer, a remainder period of the ‘parenting period’
of up to one year can be transferred to any point between the child’s 3rd and 8th
birthday. With the part time law, parents have the additional right to part time work, in
companies with over 15 employees, during the ‘parenting period’.
22
According to OECD data, approximately 71 per cent of the family policy budget in
Germany is spent on monetary payments such as child benefit, and only 29 per cent on
services. This percentage rate of services, i.e. mainly expenditure for childcare facilities,
is among the lower values in the international comparison. In Denmark, for example, 59
per cent of expenditure is reserved for services. If we examine the structure of the
family budget in detail, approximately 150 bill. Euro were subscribed to state payments
for families with children in the year 2000, according to information from the German
Federal Bank (German Federal Bank, 2002). 37,3 bill. Euro of this sum were made up
719
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
policy thus remain in effect. The interplay of the joint tax assessment of married
couples and the non-contributory insurance of family members in the health and
long term care insurance schemes, and not least the enormous deficits in the
system of childcare under public responsibility had, and still do have, an effect
of strongly pronounced negative incentives for an expansion of paid work by
mothers (Dingeldey, 2002). Conversely, up to the present day, this has meant
that those mothers who decide, against this incentive effect, for a combination
of child-rearing and paid work have to tackle a variety of everyday practical and
financial obstacles, in order to be able to live by this family model (cf. the
section on Small children’s time and space).
Policy for children and families under the ‘Red-Green’ coalition
in the current period of legislation (2002-2006)
The problems and disadvantages linked with this policy have since gained increasing attention in the discourse on family and child policy in the FRG. For
these reasons, the SPD-Green Party coalition government announced a renewed
paradigm shift in child and family policy for its second period of legislation
(2002 to 2006), and has already partly put this into practice. In a significant
departure from the previous wait-and-see attitude on the federal level in childcare policy, the federal government intends to improve the provision of public
childcare facilities across the entire children’s age groups (all-day nurseries,
after-school care in independent facilities and all-day schools). To this end, a
total of 4 bill. Euro is to be made available from 2003 to 2007 for the Länder
and local authorities primarily responsible in these policy areas, for the expansion of all-day schools, and subsequently from 2004 a further 1,5 bill. Euro for
improved care through crèches and child-minders. Following a long phase of
dominance of monetary provisions, the new motto is: services before money!
of tax measures (30,7 bill. Euro of child benefit), 26,9 bill. Euro of transfers from local
authorities (11,5 bill. Euro for intensive periods of child-rearing in the statutory pension
insurance scheme, 4,1 bill. for public assistance, 3,7 bill. for parental benefit). 71 bill.
Euro were spent on service provision (of which 7,4 bill. Euro for pre-school care, 55,3
bill. Euro for schools and higher education facilities) and 16 bill. Euro for social
insurance provisions, of which 11,5 bill. Euro on non-contributory family insurance in
health insurance schemes. The family budget defined as above rose from a share of 7,1
per cent of gross national product (GNP) in 1995 to 7,6 per cent in 1999. This increase
results above all from the restructuring and increase of child benefit and tax allowance
for children, increased construction grants for families and the re-evaluation of periods
of intensive child-rearing in pension insurance. In contrast, services stagnated during
this period.
720
COST A19: Germany
However, these ambitious federal political objectives are faced with enormous implementation problems within the federal state. The provision of public
childcare facilities for children of all age groups realised in the responsibility of
local authorities is regulated by a federal law (i.e. the children’s and juveniles’
welfare act, KJHG, of 1990), however its practical application and financing is
the responsibility of the Länder and in particular of the local authorities. The
children’s and juveniles’ welfare act stipulates the standard nationwide basic
conditions, but the concrete provisions are set in the regulatory statutes on the
Länder legislatory level. The local authorities have a lower rank as institutions
administrating childcare facilities (nurseries etc.). On the basis of the principle
of subsidiarity, childcare facilities administrated by voluntary organisations
(churches, charity organisations and further Third Sector organisations) have
priority. Correspondingly, approximately 70 per cent of nursery places in
western Germany are provided by voluntary organisations; additionally, facilities administrated by the parents (parents’ initiatives) have gained significance
since the late 1970s. Local authority children’s and young people’s departments
are responsible for establishing the level of requirements and for planning tasks.
The construction and operating costs of the facilities are financed by the local
authorities, whereby the Länder grant subsidies and the voluntary organisations
perform certain services at their own cost. Parents also pay income-dependent
contributions, which, however, only cover part of operating costs.23
This mix of regulation and financing responsibilities has been identified as a
central obstacle to the politically intended expansion of nursery facilities
(Kreyenfeld et al., 2002). For example, local authorities are free to choose which
provision of after-school care and crèche places and nursery places providing care
until the early afternoon and all-day nursery places to finance – excepting the
nationwide right to a half-day nursery place between the ages of 3 and 6. The
level of care provision thus depends on the financial scope and the priorities of
the local authorities, in the final instance. One significant result of this situation is
the strongly pronounced regional variation of care provision rates. Furthermore,
the provision of childcare places differs extremely in eastern and western Germany, due to the different initial situations following unification and the
demographic developments in both parts of the country (Table 2). While the care
provision rate in eastern Germany has remained relatively high to the present day,
23
With regard to the assumption of costs, the rule applies in most Länder that up to 30
per cent of operating costs are assumed by the Land, 30 per cent by the local authority
and 30 per cent by the corresponding voluntary organisation. The remaining 10 per cent
is paid by the parents through socially tiered contributions. With regard to investment
costs, there are considerable differences, according to regulations on the Länder
legislatory level. As a rule, the Länder assume costs of up to 50 per cent. However, not
every Land has legal regulations on the matter (Kreyenfeld et al., 2001: 43).
721
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
despite the closure of facilities and cuts totalling 30 per cent of spending between
1994 and 1998,24 provision in western Germany remains adverse. Spending in
western Germany in the above time period rose only slightly, by only 10 per
cent – starting from a low level of provision (Beher, 2001: 58).
Table 2. Provision rates per 100 children, by age groups 1990/91, 1994 and 1998.
1990/91**
1994
1998
For children 0-3 years
Germany
11.2
6.3
7.0
per 100
Western Germany
1.8
2.2
2.8
per 100
New Länder and East Berlin
54.2
41.6
36.3
per 100
For children 3-6 years
Germany
87.0*
77.2
89.5
per 100
Western Germany
78.3*
73.0
86.8
per 100
New Länder and East Berlin
114.3*
96.2
111.8
per 100
For children 6-10 years
Germany
13.8
17.2
16.0
per 100
Western Germany
5.5
5.1
6.1
per 100
New Länder and East Berlin
50.9
59.7
68.3
per 100
* The provision rate refers only to the 3 to 6 year-olds.
** The data for the new Länder including East Berlin were collected in 1991.
*** The places for school-age children were supplemented in 1994 and 1998 by the
number of children in after-school care on the school premises in East Berlin, SaxonyAnhalt, Thuringia, and in 1998 additionally in West Berlin.
Source/calculation basis: Federal Statistical Office Germany: Subject series 13, series
6.3.1, 1998, In: Deutches Jugendinstitut, 2002: 34.
The care situation is explored in more detail in the next section.
24
In view of the weak financial situation of eastern German local authorities, provision
is likely to deteriorate with the forecast increase in birth rates in the eastern Länder.
722
COST A19: Germany
Small children’s time and space:
care between family and institutions25
Children within changing families
The established tradition of assigning care, especially of the very young
children, to the family is still going strong in Germany. Rooted in the 19th
century, this concept is linked to the close association of femininity with
motherhood, the exclusion of women from the public sphere and a moral
valuation of the family space as the ‘proper’ world for mothers and children,
whereas, in line with the formation of typical gender models, it was the fathers
who, in the bourgeois family, represented the external world. In Germany,
responsibility for care and the raising of children became increasingly restricted
to the nuclear family. Care was privatised and made feminine, turned into a
responsibility customised to each individual mother.26
Also at the start of the 21th century, living in a family shapes a child’s
everyday life,27 and most children spend their childhood growing up together
with their siblings or half-siblings.28 Looked at from a more detailed perspective, however, we find considerable differences between western and eastern
Germany: in the West, the majority (77 per cent) of children up to the age of 18
have been living, from birth, with their biological married parents in a shared
household; whereas the corresponding figure in the East is just 46 per cent (Alt,
2002: 236). Although the family pattern in western Germany is rather traditional, there are indications of changes towards increasing instability of the
25
I wish to extend my gratitude to Peggy Szymenderski and Andreas Lange for
intellectual and practical support.
26
Development psychologists and anthropologists certainly agree that young children
in particular depend on reliable love, provision, education and care in order to achieve
their optimum development. To this end, the intimate frame of emotionally based
relationships in a family which do not work on the principles of efficient time and cost
management has as a rule been found to be especially suitable. Nevertheless, the effect
may be reversed by failures in the intergenerational structure of a given family, so that
the community and the state need to assume an interventionist role. For this reason,
‘care’ needs to be generally understood as a term defining the social responsibility of
furnishing tangible and intangible provision that flows from the ontological fact of
interhuman dependencies (Brückner, 2003). Care may be rendered both at a private
family level and in a professional or honorary capacity.
27
In this context, ‘family’ is defined as a network that consists of the nuclear family
living in a shared household plus relatives living in other places and other households
(Bien, 1994).
28
Very few children live in non-family facilities. Institutional care has been on a
steady decline since 1991. In 1998, 20–21 out of 10,000 children below the age of 15
lived in an institution (Bayer and Bauereiss, 2002).
723
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
conditions of growing up. These changes have clearer contours in eastern Germany. Concerning the number of siblings, the evaluations of the micro-census
show rather that half (51 per cent) of all children were growing up with one
further sibling in 1998, while only 16 per cent of all children had no further
siblings (Bellenberg 2001: 27). In 23 per cent of families, three children under
18 were living together; in only seven per cent of families, children were living
with three further siblings, and in four per cent with four further siblings.
Although these facts hold approximately for both parts of Germany, the trend
towards the two-child family is more prevalent in eastern Germany, at 58 per
cent of all children, and family arrangements with three or more children are
less common there than in western Germany.
The family situation for children has been undergoing rapid change since
1988 (cf. Figure 3):
Figure 3. Vital statistics of children in the old and new Länder of Germany, 1988-2000.
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
West 88
West 94
West 2000
East 88
East 94
born in wedlock
born out of wedlock
born premaritally
orphan or step-child
single parent
other
East 2000
Source: Alt, 2003: 240.
The increasing frequency of children living with a lone parent is also expressed
in evaluations of data from the micro-census (Bellenberg, 2001: 24-26). For
example, in 1998 2,6 mill. children under 18 years lived in a lone parent family
arrangement or with two unmarried adults; this figure is equivalent to 17 per
cent of all children, whereby this share has risen by five per cent since 1995.
724
COST A19: Germany
The lone parent family frequently represents a limited life phase of approximately 5 to 6 years. Many mothers and fathers subsequently enter into a new
partnership, in the form of a marriage or a long term unmarried relationship.
During the period of lone parenthood however, the mother or father has to cope
with all the tasks of bringing up children on their own, and also secure an
income, which can lead to a lack of both time and economic means in this kind
of family arrangement (Braches-Chyrek, 2002). Lone parent families can arise
through the death of a partner or spouse, through splitting up or divorce. The
current emergence of lone parent families is closely linked to the development
of divorce frequency.
As a consequence, an increasing number of children are exposed to disruption in their family situation, and differences between East and West Germany
are once again substantial: in western Germany, one out of three children experiences one or more changes through childhood; in eastern Germany, more than
50 per cent of all children go through one or more transitions, and the overall
rate of changes is higher as well. Special attention should be devoted to the
growing share of children raised on a long-term basis by a single parent: no
other lifestyle shows a similar growth rate. It is especially the ballooning
number of divorces (37.2 per cent of all marriages end in divorce) which
particularly affects children below the age of 18 (every second divorce involves
one or more children; Engstler and Menning, 2003: 83) and makes for increasingly unstable terms of the growing-up process. Such changes may not just
affect the subjective well-being of children but also – especially following a
divorce and the transition to a lone parent form of living – their material situation (Joos, 2001); especially in terms of their housing environment when they
remain with their newly single mother after separation and divorce (Hater, 2004).
The current processes of change affecting the situation of children and their
families are the result of contradictions accumulating over the past decades, and
they directly impact on the children’s care situation. There is no ignoring of
such contradictions in terms of:
• bourgeois ideologies of the family (pattern of male bread-winner and female
motherliness) and childhood (as a separated world of its own in which
playing rules supreme), which no longer fit newly changed structures
(working mothers, new family structures, availability of space);
• modernised internal family structures and associated valuations assigned to
family members (call for egalitarian relationships between generations and
genders) which come up against a still rigid framework (traditional working
worlds, social welfare systems);
• flexibilisation and deregulation of employment which do not take account of
(changed) families and their needs;
725
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
• the clash of gender and labour market policy goals which cannot be reconciled politically with the interests of children.
The outcome is structural disharmony between (labour) market, family, government and the intermediary sector. Yawning gaps between ideologies and structures on the one hand and the interests of children and parents on the other will
affect their everyday life. Certainly, the joint responsibility of society and
family, and of the mother and father for education, care and raising of children
is at the heart of the discourse today, but institutions will change at a snail’s
pace only. Care is turning into a care crisis which is increasingly discouraging
potential parents from begetting children (cf. the section on Childhood in the
German welfare state). Germany is in a special situation inasmuch as two very
different social logic approaches to organising care have been on a collision
course since reunification. The western German model of family-based care
combined with part-time work on the mother’s side has clashed with the eastern
German model of community-based care with a high rate of full-time
employment by the mother. Yet, the family was a sphere of critical importance
for children also in eastern Germany. Because individuals were so highly
socialised (and not always voluntarily so), the family was extremely important
as a place to retreat into private life. Even though the rates of divorce,
illegitimate children and single parents were much higher in the GDR than in
the FRG, this nevertheless did not mean that the family was de-institutionalised.
Quite on the contrary: attempts by the state to control private life rather
strengthened the weight of the family (Meulemann, 1998).
Parental employment patterns
Parental employment29 constitutes a critical frame for the child’s everyday life:
it determines whether and when parents are at home. With households shrinking
in size, it also decides (indirectly) on the presence or absence of children in the
parental household and on the need for non-parental care. Considering that most
of the care work is rendered by women, maternal employment is of particular
relevance for the time and space accorded to children. In spite of growing similarities, maternal employment still looks very different in eastern and western
Germany:
29
Parental unemployment similarly impacts on the child’s everyday life. A parent’s
loss of employment places a direct as much as indirect burden, both tangible and
intangible, on the child. Even though non-working parents have more time at their
disposal, this does not necessarily mean that they will devote more time and effort to
caring for their children. Depression and loss of control in an unemployed parent will
have a negative influence on the climate in a family (Walper, 1999).
726
COST A19: Germany
Table 3. Actively employed women as a percentage of women aged 15-64 (2000).30
East
Germany
Percentage
change
1996-2000
+0.1
Women with children
69.8
Of whom: youngest child aged
< 3 years
40.4
+6.9
3-5 years
63.4
-2.0
6-14 years
76.3
-1.4
Source: Engstler and Menning, 2003: 107; own presentation.
West
Germany
56.8
Percentage
change
1996-2000
+5.8
29.0
54.3
67.1
+3.4
+7.5
+5.2
The low rate of working mothers with children up to the age of three is
explained by the fact that an overwhelming majority of them have taken up the
state’s offer of parental timeout (see below). Although women with children up
to the age of 6 are still distinctly more often employed in East than in West
Germany, the share of working mothers is rising steadily in West Germany as
well, and children of kindergarten age tend to have working mothers, most of
them in part-time employment. East German women, on the other hand, still
model themselves along the ideal of a mother of several children working fulltime who can reconcile work and family without any major internal or external
conflicts, because child-care work is taken care of by the state, although this
model is gradually but clearly fading. 43 per cent of women in western
Germany and 27 per cent in eastern Germany, whose youngest child is three to
six years old, participate in the year 2000 in the labour market with less then 36
hours, and 11 per cent of women from western Germany in comparison to 36
per cent from eastern Germany are working more than 36 hours (Engstler and
Menning, 2003: 111).
For the children’s day-to-day life, it is not only the mother’s gainful
employment which is of importance but, more generally, parental employment
as a whole, distinguished by full-time, part-time and family work. Family
households increasingly depend on two incomes. Yet in Germany as a whole,
the model of the (male) bread-winner is still the dominant pattern among
couples with children under the age of six. Internationally, Germany has one of
the highest shares of households where the wife is not gainfully employed:
30
Actively employed are gainfully employed persons excluding those on temporary
leave, e.g. parental-leave, per 100 of the relevant population group (Engstler and
Menning, 2003).
727
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
Table 4. Gainful employment among couples with children below the age of six (in per
cent, 1998).
Man works full-time; woman works full-time
Man works full-time; woman works part-time
Man works full-time; woman has no gainful employment
Other situations
Source: Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2002: 25.
Employment
pattern
15.7
23.1
52.3
8.9
For children this means that their fathers are usually gainfully employed (fulltime). Fatherhood does not impinge on the men’s gainful employment – quite
on the contrary: the more children a family has the more and harder will the
father work. On this aspect there are hardly any differences between East and
West.
Children up to the age of three similarly find themselves in an absent-father
situation. The new parental timeout has had little effect in this respect. Fewer
than one in ten fathers will reduce his working hours, and just five per cent of
the fathers take parental leave (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2002: 33), demotivated by
the high loss of income when a father takes time out: the parental leave benefit
is no substitute for wages and salaries, and men typically earn more than
women. Instead, fathers tend to compensate, through increasing their job input,
the income loss produced when the mother goes on parental leave. The situation
is further compounded by the fact that career patterns demand high commitment
especially in the decade between 30 and 40, exactly when the need to care for a
small child occurs most frequently. A man’s identity is traditionally closely tied
to his work, and in spite of assurances of equality at the start of a partnership,
employment patterns and their consequences will ensure that care work remains
the domain of women. The return to the traditional division of work between
parents that occurs upon the birth of a child tends to have a serious impact on
the quality and stability of a partnership and thus on the child’s family
environment (Fthenakis et al., 2002).
The incidence of jobs among single mothers (about two thirds) is markedly
higher than among women who live with a partner, and the former tend to work
full-time more often. But among the single mothers of children below the age of
six, 52 per cent are not gainfully employed; 24 per cent are full-time workers
and about the same number work part-time (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2002: 26).
Once again we find the typical gap between East and West, with Eastern
mothers showing a higher rate of employment.
728
COST A19: Germany
For children, the factual absence of their fathers in couple households and in
single mother households means that their everyday life and thus their
utilisation of space and time focuses strongly on the mother and thus on the
female sex, because after all it is women who are charged with raising small
children, whether in a personal or professional capacity (see below).
However, we must not confuse the as-is situation with what parents actually
want. The following table highlights the substantial divergence between theory
and practice:
Table 5. Employment pattern desired by couple households with children below the age
of six (in per cent, 1998).
Man works full-time; woman works full-time
Man works full-time; woman works part-time
Man works full-time; woman has no gainful employment
Other situations
Source: Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2002: 25.
Desired
employment
pattern
32.0
42.9
5.7
19.4
In both parts of Germany, people clearly prefer the ‘additional earner’ model. This
preference, combined with the declining size of family households and growing
labour market participation rate among women (a trend that will continue in the
future), accelerates the pressure to provide more community care slots. Already
now, the discrepancy between actual rates of gainful employment among parents on
the one hand and inadequate institutional child care on the other hand has been
producing a typically German ‘mix’ of greatly varying care types.
Care mixes in the daily life of small children
The ‘care gap’, i.e. the discrepancy between supply of and demand for institutional care and a fact of life particularly in West Germany, has yielded a wide
range of care mixes available to children aged 0-3, 3-6 and 6-10 respectively.
Places and times available for children below the age of three
The use of space and time by children up to the age of three is essentially
governed by their life in the family – the result, chiefly, of the state-regulated
parental timeout scheme (cf. the section on The social situation of children and
729
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
families) which grants parents a ‘leave’ of up to three years to care for their
children. In 2000, fully 93 per cent of eligible parents (92 per cent in western
and 100 per cent in eastern Germany) took advantage of this scheme immediately upon giving birth to a child: at least one parent (the mother in 95 per
cent of cases) stayed at home with the child either all day or part-time (Engstler
and Menning, 2003: 115).31 After the first six months, parental timeout is paid
only up to a defined income threshold, with the result that the number of parents
who stay with their child(ren) will successively decline. In East Germany
mothers tend to return to work more quickly and more frequently. Once the
child has reached his/her first birthday, about one half of the mothers in West
Germany and just about a third of those in East Germany are on parental
timeout (ibid: 117). Overall, during the first three years of a child, 19 per cent of
mothers in West Germany and 12 per cent of mothers in East Germany with the
youngest child under three years of age are on timeout (ibid: 111).
In actual fact, a much greater proportion of mothers with children below the
age of three stay at home with the child(ren): they are either outside the labour
force (50 per cent in the West and 35 per cent in the East) or jobless (three per
cent in the West and 13 per cent in the East) (ibid).
Yet a care gap still persists for children up to three years old, since 29 per
cent of West German mothers and 40 per cent of those in East Germany are
actively employed (Table 3). Supplementary resources of institutional care, daycare centres and crèches fail to bridge the gap, especially in West Germany. In
2000, just 5.5 per cent of the children in the West spent any significant part of
the day in such facilities;32 the corresponding figure for the East is 35.1 per cent
(ibid: 121). Children of gainfully employed single parents have above-average
attendance rates because they have a priority claim to such a facility.
Added to this is the fact that in West Germany most day-care facilities for
children provide no full-day care including lunch. Only 17 per cent of the
children who actually attend a crèche spend more than half the day there, versus
71 per cent in East Germany (Veil, 2003: 22). This fails to compensate even for
the share of mothers employed full-time, much less for gainfully employed
mothers in general. Moreover, most day-care institutions in the West operate on
31
The scheme permits parallel part-time employment for up to 30 hours a week, an
option that is taken up by just 5.8 per cent of the parents while they are paid a childraising allowance, i.e. during the first two years of the child’s life (Engstler and
Menning, 2003: 116).
32
We need to distinguish between the rate of coverage and the rate of actual usage
(‘attending rate’), because slots are occasionally underused or, alternatively, ‘doublebooked’. For this reason, the Deutsches Jugendinstitut – DJI-figures indicate a coverage
of just 2.8 per cent (DJI, 2002: 151), which is, furthermore, subject to extreme regional
variations. The usual statistics thus provide only limited information on the factual
behaviour of children.
730
COST A19: Germany
standardised opening hours of 8 am to 12 noon or 4 pm which fail to cover
maternal absences resulting from gainful employment and transport.33
Another – albeit very rare – care option is child care organised at company level
which does consider maternal working hours (Hagemann et al., 1999). It is
typically available only in major corporations, but in those instances where it is
offered, mothers may, at least in some places, get care between 6 am and 10 pm
on a year-round basis.
In a further attempt to bridge the care gap for the under-three-year-olds,
another semi-institutional facility is used: Tagespflege (family day care) offers
care in a ‘substitute’ family, organised on a public/private basis at a ratio of
around 1:4 (Deutsches Jugendinstitut – DJI, 2002: 151).34 It involves a childminder (usually female) providing regular care for a child not her own, often
together with the care for her own child(ren), either at the outside child’s own
place or at the minder’s place.35 Child-minders are paid very little for their work
and, at most, get an abbreviated training for their job. Just 3.5 per cent of the
children below three years of age are in the care of child-minders; the practice is
more common in urban communities, and relatively rare in East Germany due
to the denser network of crèches available to mothers.
At 14 hours per week, the average time that a child spends with his/her
minder is much shorter than the time spent in a crèche (27 hours) (ibid: 159),
but hours frequently differ from crèche opening hours (8 am to 12 noon or
4 pm).
There are three reasons to explain the fact that child-minding is at least as
common in West Germany as are day-care facilities: firstly, it is a better
reflection of family ideology in West Germany; secondly it compensates for the
shortage of crèche slots; and thirdly it offers greater flexibility in time, so that it
is better in covering marginal and additional hours put in by working mothers.
Children in the care of child-minders more often than other children (15 per
cent vs. five per cent) also spend time in a crèche (ibid: 160); child-minding
frequently serves complementary to crèche care. It may be assumed that such
combined care is utilised particularly by families of mothers working full-time
because they need substantially more child care than is available on a publicly
organised basis.
Care gaps are also bridged by informal care, usually provided by relatives.
One out of three children below the age of three is cared for by relatives
33
Nevertheless there is a considerable regional bandwidth in standard offers as well as
the occasional innovative model (DJI, 2002a).
34
Its public organisation is through the Youth Offices; the legal basis is provided in
the Child and Youth Services Act KJHG.
35
Data on family-day-care are inadequate, so that the discussion is limited to estimates
and qualitative single studies.
731
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
(Büchel and Spieß, 2002), typically grandparents, who live in the near vicinity
(Table 6). However, no data are available whether such children stay at the
grandparents’ or parental household and whether the situation for children
under three is different.
Table 6. Spatial distance between 10-14 year old children and their grandparents (in per
cent).36
Same house/household
Neighbourhood
Same community
Another community
More than one hour’s drive
Maternal grandparents
Paternal grandparents
Grandfather Grandmother Grandfather Grandmother
5.0
8.8
9.6
13.4
11.1
12.3
20.9
17.9
18.1
17.2
20.0
19.5
43.3
40.8
28.3
31.9
22.4
20.9
21.2
17.3
Source: Lange and Lauterbach, 1998.
Figures nevertheless confirm the assumption that the strength of family ties
between members not living in the same household is relevant for a child’s
everyday life, and that therefore any definition of family that focuses on a shared
household is simply inadequate. A family network study summarizes that
• two related family households live under the same roof in seven per cent of
cases;
• 20 per cent of related family households live at a neighbourhood distance,
and
• a large number of relatives (30-40 per cent) live about an hour’s drive away
(Fuchs, 2003).
In its density, the network of relatives depends on the size of the community in
which they reside (ibid: 93). Older siblings, if any, and other relatives chip in
when it comes to child care, albeit with a lesser time input.
Such support apart, there is a grey area of privately and informally organised
child care which is difficult to assess quantitatively in scope and location, but
tends to be of a short-term nature and cover ‘marginal’ times. Care for small
children comes from family self-help initiatives, neighbourhood help groups,
au-pair workers and ‘nannies’, the latter typically immigrants moonlighting in a
family (approximately three per cent, Fthenakis, 2003).
36
No data currently exist for younger children, but figures appear to be even higher.
732
COST A19: Germany
Table 7. Care-givers for children in the age of 0-3 years (in brackets for children of 3-6
years).
Care rate,
per cent
Average care per
week, hours
Care provided by:
elder sister
1.1 (2.5)
elder brother
1.0 (2.1)
grandmother
24.4 (26.3)
grandfather
9.7 (12.3)
other relative
4.6 (3.7)
Family Day Care
Day-carer
3.0 (1.3)
other non-relative
2.5 (3.7)
No other care giver
67.7 (65.6)
Source: DJI, 2002: 159, survey 62.
Proportion of
children receiving
additional institutional care, per cent
16 (15.4)
8.8 (14.4)
10.3 (9.4)
9.9 ( 8.5)
14.5 (8.3)
0 (71)
0 (61)
10 (85)
13 (83)
10 (85)
14.2 (14.9)
18 (10)
15 (87)
5 (68)
5 (75)
The projection of a typical child’s everyday life up to the age of three shows
that they spend most of their day in the parental home together with the mother
or, as a second line, with their grandparents.37 They get up at around 7 am and
leave home only to visit the playground or are taken by their mother on a round
of shopping or visiting. A small number of children stays at a crèche for about
5.5 hours a day on average: the crèche normally opens at 8 am and closes at 4
pm. Both groups may have other institutional and informal care arrangements
set up for them. Crèche time is the longest period of external care. If we add the
typically shorter care periods in a private situation (altogether 11.5 hours per
week, DJI, 2002: 158), we get a ‘relay’ of care-givers changing several times a
day. One in four children alternates between two care facilities outside the
family (Tietze, 1990: 182).
Children of that age at most spent an hour with their father, during weekdays
typically in the evening, between 7 and 8 pm, just before they are sent to bed
(Statistisches Bundesamt, 2004). The weekends are mostly ‘pure’ family time.
37
Such a projection (as well as similar projections involving older children)
demonstrates the serious shortage of studies that survey the day course of children. Data
are restricted to care segments, and do not extend to the overall care mix. A single
exception is provided by the ‘Münster care study’ (Tietze, 1990) which, however, was
carried out already in the second half of the 1980s. In a similar vein, the new time
budget study of the Federal Statistical Office starts with 10 year old children. The DJI
‘Longitudinal Study of Children’ commences at the age of five.
733
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
Places and times available to children of age three to six
Three- to six-year-old children spend their time along entirely different lines,
both in terms of institutional and informal care. Most enjoy a more balanced
care situation, divided between parental, institutional and informal care, than is
available to their younger peers. By far the most have their life filled by a
combination of kindergarten and family time, with game time with friends and
sports or arts activities thrown in.38 Consequently, transport (usually by parents)
begins to take up more time (Kramer, 2004), and many children find their
sphere of activities extending beyond the family home.
In West Germany, the supply of kindergarten slots covers 87 per cent of
demand; East Germany, in contrast, has an overcapacity of 112 per cent (Hank et
al., 2003: 26 – see also Table 2).39 Attendance rates indicate that the gap between
East and West Germany has virtually closed once the children reach an age of
four to five years (Alt, 2004: 8). Nevertheless, the offer of whole-day kindergarten slots in western Germany is still inadequate: just 19 per cent of the demand
can be met, compared to 98 per cent in eastern Germany (ibid: 7). Most of the
Western children attend kindergarten in the morning and go home for lunch,
whereas those in eastern Germany usually stay the whole day long (cf. Figure 4):
Figure 4. Kindergarten opening hours, eastern and western Germany.
other
1
1
morning and afternoon, no lunch
0
5
18
whole-day, lunch
76
1
0
afternoon, no lunch
11
morning, lunch
morning, no lunch
16
64
7
0
East Germany
20
40
60
80
100
West Germany
Number of cases: n=999; East Germany: n=147; West Germany: N=852; level of
significance: 0.0001
Source: DJI, children panel, 1th wave, own calculations.
38
No study is available on this age group, with the exception of the DJI ‘Longitudinal
Study of Children’, which has not yet furnished its final results. The following data are
taken from first-wave preliminary results from an unpublished manuscript (Alt, 2004).
39
Once again, regional differences are important: both East and West still have areas
of insufficient coverage. Alt’s latest results (2004) find that urban locations no longer
are sure pointers of high coverage rates but that the issue is decided by the economic
and social situation of a given region.
734
COST A19: Germany
In their everyday life, children in Germany are subject to considerable differences in their lifestyles: some (mostly in eastern Germany) spend much of their
time in an institutionalised environment; others (mostly in western Germany)
tend to pass more of their time in a family surrounding.40
When we consider maternal full-time employment (as outlined above: 10 per
cent of mothers of children aged three to five in the West; more than a third in
the East), the above figures do not point at a direct bottleneck because kindergartens provide sufficient care-places for this age group of children. Furthermore, the fact that kindergartens close down completely only for some four or
five weeks of the holiday periods provides some relatively suitable help for
gainfully employed parents to reconcile such periods with their own paid leave.
But a care gap will still arise in many cases because part-time work, an
advancing work style both in western and eastern Germany, is no longer
typically a morning job: the parent will not necessarily be able to knock off
from work at the time when the child has to be fetched from the kindergarten. If
we also consider the travelling time required by the parent there will always be
time gaps when the child is waiting and the mother is in a breathless hurry.
Consequently, there is considerable need for adjustment of the marginal
opening hours of kindergartens. Although lately the occasional kindergarten has
begun to vary its hours – some facilities allow children to arrive before 8 am
and stay after 6 pm or even (in extremely rare cases) during the weekend (DJI,
2002a) – such long and flexible opening hours are the rare exception rather than
anything like a rule and – at least in the West – not reliable, and they certainly
do not cover the factual care need.
Accordingly, children of this age, in addition to attending kindergarten,
obtain extra regular care from persons external to their household, especially
when the mother is gainfully employed. For the three- to six-year-olds, such
additional care on an informal and regular basis is almost identical in eastern
and western Germany (Hank et al., 2003: 26). Children of single parents and
non-marital couples on average experience more additional care arrangements
than those with parents in a traditional marriage situation (Alt, 2004: 24).
Within the range of informal care options, family-day-care is less used by
children from 3-6 years in comparison to those from 0-3 years, but hours
themselves are slightly increased (Table 7). There is a widespread care-mix by
using additional care. This fact once again points at care gaps suffered by the
group of children of gainfully employed mothers.
40
Use of the kindergarten is to a significant extent decided by the social status: more
than half of the parents whose children do not attend kindergarten are in a very low
social stratum (Alt, 2004: 11). Similarly, the care mix clearly depends on the social
level, as well as on regional factors (ibid: 26 f).
735
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
The typical everyday life of most children in West Germany involves
attendance of the kindergarten between 8 am and 12 noon. At noon, the child is
fetched and returns home, where the mother has cooked and serves lunch. The
child spends afternoon at home or plays with friends in the near surrounding or
makes use of some leisure-time activity. A smaller number of children spend
their whole day (i.e. up to 4 pm) at the kindergarten, which is the normal
situation in East Germany. For some of the children, a variety of informal care
schemes follows morning care at the kindergarten, the former provided chiefly
by grandparents or child-minders. If activities take place at different venues, it
is usually the mother who does the afternoon chauffeuring, whereas fathers
deliver and fetch their children of this age group in the morning and evening
(Kramer, 2004).
Relay care (‘Staffettenbetreuung’) is on the increase. The number of care
types per day rises with the child’s age: every second child in the 3-6 age group
commutes between family care and at least two other care types (Tietze, 1990).
By 6 pm, most fathers are back home in time for the family supper, followed by
playtime with father. By 8 pm at the latest it is bedtime for the child. Once
again, the weekend is dedicated to the family: this is when fathers in particular
have time for their children, which they spend on games and sports (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2004: 22).
Children aged six to ten in after-school day-care centres
The care situation of elementary school children once again constitutes a
problem in Germany, similarly characterised by an East/West gap. All-day
schools are still very much the exception in both parts of Germany. But whereas
in eastern Germany at least 16.4 per cent of elementary school children (6-10
year-olds) make use of an after-school day-care centre and 13.3 per cent attend
an all-day school, the respective figures for West Germany were just four per
cent (after-school day-care) and 3.7 per cent (all-day school) in 1998 (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2002: 31). In view of the growing inclusion of mothers in the
active labour force, also in full-time employment, a supply gap is opening in
this age group. It widens considerably during holidays, since school holidays
(approximately 12 weeks) are substantially longer than the typical holiday leave
granted to workers (max. 5 weeks). Such care gaps are again bridged by a mix
of care types, where relatives continue to play a major role, and child-minders
are an additional option for at least one in five school children (Tietze, 1990).
Nevertheless, the children are increasingly left to their own devices, a situation
which they face with ambivalent feelings (cf. the section on Schoolchildren’s
activities in time and space).
736
COST A19: Germany
Blurring boundaries: solving or deepening the care crisis?
For the past years the relationship between childhood, family and working life
has been changing, driven by increasingly flexible working hours and work
places. Will this ease or perhaps even solve the care crisis? All studies on the
future of work agree that the process of blurring boundaries will continue and
even accelerate. The fordistic division of labour – with a woman-centred family
and a clearly distinct working life – works for ever fewer parents.
The newly evolving type of the ‘entreployee’ (Voß and Pongratz, 1998) can
no longer take for granted fixed and stable time schedules and work places, a
continuous work biography, clear and stable job status. Flexible working hours
are growing to be the norm.
By 1999, just 15 per cent of the dependently employed in the FRG were still
subject to a regime of so-called ‘standard working hours’ (Groß and Munz,
2000),41 compared to 27 per cent some ten years ago (Groß et al., 1987). The
remaining 85 per cent put in:
•
•
•
•
•
•
regular shift and night work (18 per cent),
weekend work (16 per cent on Sundays, 35 per cent on Saturdays),
regular overtime (56 per cent),
part-time work (20 per cent, of which 87 per cent are women),
flexitime (83 per cent),
working time account schemes (37 per cent), e.g. block leisure time and
sabbaticals.
Such processes indicate that the strict separation between paid work and
holiday, between working hours and leisure time, is being abandoned. Working
hours increasingly fail to define clear structures for organising the segments of
occupational and family life. The length and rhythm of work to which working
parents submit are being renegotiated – not just the beginning and end of the
daily work but also the rhythm of weekly and annual work. Ancient temporal
institutions, such as knocking-off time, weekend or annual leave, are about to
lose their compulsive nature as timers for parents in gainful employment.
Temporal flexibilisation goes hand in hand with locational flexibilisation.
When it comes to space, the work place is no longer restricted to the company
premises. Work may be brought home (a new type of cottage industry, typically
teleworking), made possible by novel information and communications
technologies. Another spatial change is being effected by travelling becoming
normal. Field work (e.g. consulting) is intensified, as is commuting (Kramer,
41
I.e. full-time employment of 35–40 hours per week, distributed over five days
(Mondays to Fridays), at a single work place.
737
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
2004; Bonß and Kesselring, 1999). Mobility is on the rise, and distances
between different work places as well as between work place(s) and home are
growing. Commuting has given rise to weekend relationships as a form of living
apart together. Parents need to re-organise the spatial structure of their work
between workplace, home and travel. Where gainful employment takes place at
home, the previous spatial separation needs to be replaced by a factual
separation between paid work and family work.
This leads to new challenges for children’s everyday lives and in caring for
children from the parents’ view. In order to decide whether greater flexibility
makes family life easier or more difficult, we need to remember the specific
demands of family care. Caring for a child or an elderly relative is not
something that you can decide anew every day. The care-giver is committed to
submit to reliable and stable arrangements because such a relationship is based
on another person being in a dependent position. Care work needs predictable
times in order to enable both parties to be together at all. Family life requires
fixed schedules, rituals and rules. On the other hand, care demands may well
change every day because they are flexible by nature and subject to changes in
intensity, which may call for quick responses. Child care does not follow a
logical path, or comply with a time schedule or programme that is amenable to
improvements in efficiency. In summary, a family needs working conditions
which allow both: stability as well as flexibility. Immediate care needs apart, it
requires shared time and time for the family in order to experience the ‘family’
as a quality-of-life aspect, as living together as a family rather than side by side
as individuals.
The crucial point of blurring boundaries with regard to care for children up
to the age of six is the ongoing erosion of when, how long and where parents
put in their paid working hours. Four consequences are conceivable: parents
have more time to spend with their children at home; parents are physically
more present at home but are occupied with their bring-home work; parents
have less time to spend with their children; or children obtain their care from
more and more flexibly arranged complementary institutional or informal care
services. The first three of this list are well in place, whereas the last one is just
emerging. So far, little empirical research is available on this issue, and a little
more on the specific perspective of children’s everyday lives.
• What we do know is that blurring boundaries result in stricter time management in families (Jurczyk and Rerrich, 1993). A general feeling of time
shortage and time acceleration apart, it is the erosion of external time and
predetermined spatial structures which reinforces the need for individuals to
define their working time and working space themselves. This need is forced
on us rather than self-chosen and it may well translate into overburdening
the families. Family life generally means that the time structures and
738
COST A19: Germany
activities of several people will necessarily clash, and the current trend
towards more flexibility makes synchronisation even more necessary.
Obviously, synchronisation problems get worse when both parents are on
flexible time schedules. Such a situation requires them to constantly (re)organise their time and energy (Behringer and Jurczyk, 1995). The result is
a daily round of negotiation, which spans all the people who are included in
the family’s care network. Knocking-off time, leisure time, holiday time,
time for children – they have to be defended against the employer in a new
way. When people work at home (e.g. at the computer), work will make ever
greater inroads on the private life sphere. The new everyday life situation
means that people juggle precariously at the edge rather than gain a
successful balance. With the new flexibility, shared time frequently needs to
be identified and planned. A multi-headed family will run into ever greater
problems finding time to share. The trend is clearly moving towards
weekend families (Kleine, 2003), while the time in between is arranged by
pinboard and cellphone messages – but such strategies work only with older
children.
• Secondly, we find an optimistic view of flexibilisation. Parents (and again
especially mothers) actually can combine work and family, and fathers have
an opportunity to spend time with their children. Recent studies by Klenner
et al. (2003) of the effect of sabbaticals and working time accounts show that
some parents are highly satisfied with the new opportunities of reconciling
work and the family and the father’s co-parenting contribution. They are
enthusiastic about the potential offered by such time regimes to respond
flexibly to the changing demands of the children. In these modern families,
where each member has his/her own rhythm, a new process is emerging
where specific rituals and routines are created and new traditions are built to
facilitate the organisation of everyday life.
• The result of the new flexibility depends on the details: the work regime, the
age of the children who need care and the interaction with other care
systems. Thus when it comes to the rapidly spreading system of working
time accounts, their success depends on the time span required before any
long time blocks have been collected to be consumed with children (Eberling
et al., 2004). But this does not help parents in their day-to-day care work for
small children and still requires them to make use of supplementary day care
systems. The benefit to be derived from working time accounts also depends
on the scope at which workers can ‘draw’ time from their account, which
varies greatly between companies.
• Greater mobility by way of longer travelling periods obviously poses
problems for families with children. More than half of the women working
in jobs that require high mobility have no children (Schneider et al., 2002) –
double the average rate of all women without children and still substantially
739
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
higher than the 44 per cent of academically qualified women without
children (Engstler and Menning, 2003). Work-caused mobility outside the
home, typified by the new ‘job nomads’, thus is difficult to handle for
parents. Where spatial boundaries are blurred, new and flexible care arrangements are required to compensate for overnight and weekend absences of
mobile parents. Nevertheless, mobility is tied to gender: more fathers
commute between greater distances, whereas a majority of mothers is still
stationary. The other, more ‘internal’ type of blurring boundaries, i.e.
working at home, which is prevalent among the self-employed and teleworkers, does not automatically facilitate everyday life in a family. Whereas
fathers manage to distance themselves from care requirements, mothers try
to balance them by constantly switching between the job and children. They
accept interruptions, do their work in bits and pieces, and by this method are
accessible for the concerns and problems of their children (Jurczyk, 2002).
Shifting gainful employment into the family, and thus ensuring the presence
of a care-giver, may perhaps resolve problems of reconciliation but may at
the same time generate new problems. Certainly the new type of ‘home
work’ is no equivalent to the supposed idyll of the pre-modern pastoral
cottage industry where the whole extended family lived and worked under a
single roof.
• Summarising the effects of flexible working time and space in their different
facets, they appear to be highly ambivalent in their impact on child care
(Jürgens, 2003). Some instances of flexible working time and space do offer
some leeway (such as flexitime, part-time and teleworking), but on the other
hand, parents are expected to become compatible with the economic logic of
their company. Mothers have been demanding flexible working hours for
several decades in order to better handle the changing demands of children,
respond to illnesses, etc., but also in order to compensate for the rigid
opening hours of care institutions. However, considering that companies
increasingly tend to expect their employees to be available at all times,
flexibility threatens to turn negative. At present, much evidence points to the
assumption that flexible working hours exacerbate rather than solve the care
crisis because the care institutions have failed to adjust their own opening
hours accordingly.
The care crisis in the form of a shortage of care slots is further aggravated by
the greater need for flexible opening hours in crèches and kindergartens, for
further care networks and for new services for families. Currently, new commercial service providers are mushrooming which offer care and operate as
flexible backup systems, occasionally late into the night, overnight and during
the weekend. Faced with an ever more flexible working world, child-minding
services will similarly be in ever greater demand, because they offer flexibility
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COST A19: Germany
due to their semi-private nature. Blurring boundaries will solve the care crisis
only when parents themselves determine (or at least have some say in) the place
and time of work, when such factors apply reliably and are not subject to
constant change due to company processes.
Is there a care crisis? Experiences and values of children and
parents
How do children and parents experience the care situation? Do they realise that
there actually is a care crisis? What do they want? What does increasing
flexibility mean to them?
Parental views of child care
The care situation of small children is recognised as a problem in Germany, as
is evidenced by the Federal Government’s plan to provide institutional care for
about 20 per cent of the under-three-year-olds. Nevertheless this does not cover
the demand, neither from the children’s nor from the parents’ point of view.
Fathers and mothers want different working time arrangements, one out of three
fathers wants more time for his family (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2004), some
parents want better institutional care. On the latter point, opinions are divided:
women both in western and eastern Germany perceive their gainful employment
as less negative for their children than do men, although the difference is greater
in the West. This gap may be explained by the fact that East German men
realised in the past that women’s gainful employment did not produce any
negative consequences. Fully 62 per cent of the west Germans, as against only
40 per cent of the east Germans, think that external child care negatively affects
the children. Attendance of three- to six-year-old children of whole-day
kindergarten is seen by West German mothers as mostly negative, whereas East
German mothers clearly favour it (Codebuch Allbus, 1980-98: 162).
For two out of three women with children up to elementary school age,
regardless of whether living in the East or West, the preferred choice is one
family partner working full-time and the other part-time (20 to 25 hours;
Engstler and Menning, 2003: 113). Although a greater number of the couples
(one third) wants full-time working for both than is the case today (see the
section on Small children’s time and space), the majority are in favour of
reduced working hours. Among men in family households the desire to cut job
working hours (substantially: by up to nine hours) is more widespread (30 per
cent) than among women (22 per cent; Bauer, 2004) – an expression of the
difference in burdens that stem from working hours. For mothers, the desire
depends i.a. on their actual job working hours: full-time employed women in all
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
of Germany wish to have their time on the job reduced to 30 hours
(Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2002: 26), whereas mothers with part-time employment,
especially in East Germany, would frequently like to spend more time on the
job than is the case today. For mothers in West Germany, involuntary part-time
work is significantly linked to the problem of insufficient and usually part-time
child care (Büchel and Spieß, 2002); for their East German peers, it is due to a
shortage of full-time jobs.
Flexible job working hours, which have the greatest impact on the sharing of
family life, are viewed critically: 46 per cent of the shiftworkers living in a
family wish to reduce or give up shift work; as do 69 per cent of those working
on Saturdays, 68 per cent of those working on Sundays and 54 per cent of
workers putting in regular overtime (Bauer, 2004).
Children’s views of care and the care crisis
First of all we need to counter a widespread assumption: recent research has not
found any evidence that parents and children spend less time together while
mothers’ employment rates are rising. The new time budget study (Statistisches
Bundesamt 2004: 22) finds that, in 2001, parents spent more time with their
children below the age of six than was the case in 1991 – altogether 6.75 hours
vs. 6 hours. This figure includes child care as a main activity as well as parallel
activity carried out jointly with shopping and household work.42 Even single
parents still spend a total of 4.5 hours with their children. The situation shows
potential for polarisation between families with and without time welfare,
between traditionally organised families where the mother stays at home or
jobless parents who have plenty of time on the one hand, and parents who are
both gainfully employed (especially those in full-time jobs) who have little
time, on the other hand. Working mothers compensate for the lack of time by
reducing their own time spent on sleeping and leisure. If we shift the focus from
the quantity to the quality of together-time, such a sleep-reducing strategy
deepens the impression of hurried and overworked parents which in turn takes
us to the quality of life issue from the child’s point of view.
Qualitative studies have shown that the extent of parental work is a decisive
factor for the children’s well-being – and it works in both directions (Klenner et
42
It should, however, be noted that these aggregated data do not distinguish by groups
of gainfully employed and jobless. In view of the high unemployment rate, especially in
East Germany, it is only to be expected that time spent on gainful employment declines
so that more time is left for the children. A more detailed evaluation is currently
underway.
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COST A19: Germany
al., 2003; Roppelt, 2003).43 Both sides – children whose parents work long
hours and children whose parents put in only a few hours of gainful
employment – find their family situation to be rather stressful. Many of the girls
and boys questioned expressed their contentment with the individual care
solution found by their parents. Children have developed basic criteria for wellbeing and contentment: ‘For as long as I don’t feel alone,’ says a nine-year-old
girl, addressing the balance that working parents have to achieve in managing
care for their children. The point is not so much ensuring the parents’ constant
presence but rather finding a balance between proximity and distance, i.e.
between work and family that will generate satisfaction and well-being in the
child.
‘It is important that somebody is at home or can be phoned – we arrange that.
After all, I do need help with my homework. My parents needn’t be there all the
time, only when I need them.’ (a nine-year-old boy)
We cannot always assume a linear connection between the parents’ job burden
and a higher burden to be carried by the affected children. Satisfaction is typically found in children whose parents bear a medium-scale work load (Roppelt,
2003). Fully 70 per cent of these children were satisfied with a care situation
which enables them to enjoy a balance between easy-going and social environments, between boundaries and freedom.
Children are also dissatisfied when the mother is not gainfully employed and
they feel eternally observed and monitored because of her constant presence
which robs them of an opportunity to escape the family regime:
‘It gets on my nerves when there’s always somebody around. No matter what I
do, my mother will always notice. I can’t watch TV or eat when I want to. I told
her to go to work for a few hours but she doesn’t want to.’ (an eleven-year-old
girl)
The children questioned by the study have pinpointed four desirable types of
parental presence and absence: they wish for affection, proximity and activities
shared with their parents, but also for autonomously enjoyable periods of time.
Dissatisfaction with their parents’ time management is expressed in particular
situations: when they feel ill or emotionally distressed or when there is a special
43
Questioning children on the job working hours of their parents is a methodological
problem, affected, i.a., by the child’s age. Children up to the age of six are difficult to
question and are unable to keep a diary. Among the older children, many have never
reflected on the issue, others take things as given, and only a very few think consciously
of the problem (Näsman, 2003). Another key factor for the children’s welfare is the
quality of their sphere of activities (Blinkert, 1997).
743
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
occasion, children demand much more time from their parent(s) and perceive
their presence to be indispensable and a matter of course.
With regard to flexible and irregular working hours of their parents, children
suffer from not knowing when their parents will be at home. The problem is not
so much being alone but being forced to wait and not able to plan anything. For
the eight- to ten-year-olds polled, the problem is in the uncertainty of working
hours and, consequently, care hours which do not lend itself to advance
planning:
‘I never know when she comes home. When she has a business meeting and does
not know in advance, she will come later. And I need to wait and can’t arrange
anything with my friends. I never can tell them to come, because my mother may
not be at home. That’s really vexing me.’ (a nine-year-old boy)
‘I may come home and mum’s there, and another time I come home and mum’s
not there. Some time it’s this way and some time that – I can’t rely on anything.
Then I look in on granny whether she is at home, but it would be best if I were at
home. It bothers me that I don’t know in advance and I get furious when things
don’t work out.’ (a ten-year-old boy)
Another restriction noted by children is the long periods of waiting and stop-gap
measures until the parents will at last come home after work. They experience
this as particularly aggravating, mainly because children are usually allowed to
play outside only when their parents are at home. Stop-gap measures may result
from demands on the parents’ part that derive from their working hours and are
perceived as too difficult by the child:
‘Mummy cuts me a slice of bread and prepares something for me to heat. But
doing all that on my own is difficult because after all I am only eight years old. I
am also afraid that I might forget to switch off the stove and sometimes there are
these funny noises. Then I am always glad when mummy gets back and I am no
longer alone.’ (an eight-year-old girl)
The subject of autonomy as an opportunity or unreasonable expectation clearly
arises as a result of specific working hour arrangements. It is noticeable how
much expectations are first directed at the mother.
From the children’s point of view, a desirable care situation is constituted of
the following elements: good oral arrangements, reliability, certainty that the
parents can be reached, parents who are relaxed and not always in a hurry, no
waiting periods, more shared quality time with the parents, especially with the
father,44 and some time that can be spent alone.
44
A wish chiefly expressed by the children in eastern Germany (Mayr, 2002).
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COST A19: Germany
Children greatly appreciate family arrangements that comprise both parents:
‘In our family, mummy works at school. So daddy is often here and on weekdays
I take my meals with him. I am never alone, either daddy or mummy is at home.
They also take turns in the mornings. I like that because in this way I have both
of them.’ (a nine-year-old girl)
Children also greatly appreciate it when their parents manage to skilfully reconcile job and family. A clever solution that produces a harmonious link between
the family and parental job(s) will be facilitated by working conditions that
accommodate the need to co-ordinate the partners’ work schedules.
With this, the ‘care crisis’ has so far had only conditional impact on the
children themselves, chiefly on those children whose parents have irregular
working hours or both work full-time. Most children voice their satisfaction
with the presence and absence of their parents (Mayr and Ulich, 2002). This is
due to the fact that the family still operates as a ‘safety net’ because it (chiefly
through mothers and relatives) compensates in time what institutions fail to
deliver. It still works – but frequently at the cost of overburdened and
dissatisfied parents.
Schoolchildren’s activities in time and space
This section focuses on the impact of recent changes in the economy as well as
in spatial developments on the times and places where children learn and play,
and on the ways children use space and handle their time. It will show, firstly,
how the impact of recent changes in the economy on the temporal organisation
of children’s learning is mediated by adults’ ambivalence between the images of
the playing child and the learning child. Secondly, it will illustrate how the
structural power of spatial specialisation and separation processes is translated
to children’s daily life world by adults who struggle with an ambivalence
between their images of the autonomous child and the child that has to be
controlled. Last but not least, children’s ways of meeting adult-made
opportunities and constraints shall be reported.
The power of school on children’s time
Increase and reduction of years in school
Nine or ten years (depending on the Länder) of school are compulsory; as a rule
from the age of six. Although compulsory schooling begins at age six, half of
children enter school after their 7th birthday. For the first four or six years all
745
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
children attend primary school, and then continue in one of the different types
of secondary I level. One type is the grammar school that then goes on for a
further three or two years (secondary II level) and is finished by an exam
(Abitur) which enables university study. Prolongation of regular time in school
is rather frequent because of class repetition. Every year, 1.9 per cent of all
pupils in primary school have to repeat a year and in secondary I schools this
figure is 4.2 per cent. Of 15 year-olds in 2000, between 11.2 per cent and 35.7
per cent (varying between the Länder) had one or more delays in their school
career (Avenarius et al., 2003: 74 and 473).
Table 8. Pupils in general schools 1999, percentage of the age group population (in per
cent), 1999.
age 5
age 6
age 7
age 8
2.2
5.5
99.4
100.0
age 16
age 17
age 18
age 19
age 20
Source: FMER, 2001: 24-25.
100.0
37.8
26.9
14.0
3.2
Until recently, the secular process of continual increase of the time the young
generation spends in school was valued as a form of progress in children’s
welfare, because more children are relieved for more time from the working
world and instead enjoy the value of education for their personal development.
Now the expansion of time for institutionalised learning is questioned by both
the politicians who are responsible for the development of the educational
system, and the children themselves. Policy concerns relate to the ageing of the
population that will soon be unlikely to allow for a high amount of possible
labour power being absorbed by a very long duration of life time spent
exclusively on education. One measure is a one year abridgement of school
duration until the final grammar school exam, from 13 to 12 years (only two
years in secondary II level) that has now been started to be implemented in all
Länder. Because the overall number of lessons will not be reduced, more
lessons will be held within each year.
Concerning the beginning of the school career, a campaign has been started
against parents’ tendency to prolong children’s time before entering school. The
tendency to put off starting school is partly due to a low standard of skills at age
six, caused by a lack of learning promotion on the part of kindergartens (as
politicians argue), partly by parents who want to save their child from being
reached by the power of school at a time they judge as too early; they want their
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COST A19: Germany
child to play for as long as possible in early childhood. On the part of the
parents, concepts of the playing child and the learning child are conflicting.
However an extension of learning time into early childhood has to be taken in
account: Reacting to the shocking German results of the international school
achievement study ‘PISA’, recently new efforts have been made to empower
early learning within the pre-school care system.
Prolongation of daily time in school
In classes 1 to 6 children spend on average 27 hours a week in school. Including
time for homework and for the way to school, the amount of their time spent on
school is 31 hours, while older pupils spend 39 hours in secondary II level
schools, and 46 hours in secondary II level grammar school. Per year, 9 to 14
year-olds spend 850 hours in school, while the average in OECD countries is
889 hours (Avenarius et al., 2003: 75 and 143).
As a rule, school takes place in the mornings only. Since more mothers are
in the working world, severe care problems arise caused by several time gaps
between children’s school hours and parents’ working hours:
• In the children’s first years at school the daily number of lessons is small,
and school begins and ends at different times each day, some days earlier,
others later. Additionally, when a teacher is unable to work, school lessons
are often suddenly cancelled because of a lack of teachers for financial
reasons.
• At midday, schools send children home hungry.
• On Saturdays there is no school (few exceptions); the placing of lessons in the
week had been adjusted to most parents’ five-day working week in the 1980s.
However, working on Saturdays is now becoming more frequent again.
• Children have more than twice as many free days in the year as their parents.
They have twelve weeks of school holidays in summer, autumn, late winter,
and at Christmas and Easter. There are not enough institutional programmes
to care for school children in their holidays, neither enough afternoon care
institutions which open during holiday time nor special holiday arrangements. Therefore some families cannot go on holiday altogether, some
children stay at home alone, and others enjoy several journeys, one with the
mother, one with the father, others with grandparents who help in many
families (see the section on Small children’s time and space).
Until recently, schools never regarded care as their obligation. The patterns of
school time have been oriented only to the hourly requirements resulting from
the curricula and from teachers’ working times and carried through by the
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
power of the state; the school system has always taken the non-working mother
for granted who in principle can look after her child at home at any time. The
efforts of reform-oriented teachers and educational scientists towards the
implementation of more all-day schools was doomed to failure because of the
widespread opinion that more hours at school would demand too much from
children, and moreover it did not fit in with teachers’ understanding of their role
and time-space organisation of work. The increasing participation of mothers in
the working world suffering from a lack of time for their children plays an
important role in the fact that parents’ demands for more institutional time for
their children is now taken seriously by policy makers.
• More and more primary schools are expanding young children’s daily times
in school in order to cover the whole morning. Some of those realise an
additional model where ordinary lessons are followed by caring time
(‘verlässliche Grundschule’), others realise an integrated model (‘volle
Halbtagsgrundschule’), where the increased amount of time is organised in a
new way in order to help the children learn in a less stressed and more cooperative way. However not many of these provide a midday meal. At least
some primary schools open the building very early in the morning in order to
prevent pupils whose parents start work early from waiting in the streets.
• Since very recently, all political parties have been demanding more all-day
schools (Ganztagsschulen). In spite of a difficult financial situation, in
summer 2003 the government agreed to spend money on establishing 10,000
additional all-day schools. Statistics on the number of children already
attending all-day schools are not available because of different forms of such
schools. ‘All-day schools’ which receive the proposed state funding must
offer a midday meal and an afternoon programme – mostly voluntary
activities – at least at three days per week, which must be in the responsibility of the school even if it is run by social workers or caring personal. In
2002/2003, less than 10 per cent of all pupils at primary and secondary I
school level attended a school defined in this way. There is a surplus demand
for places (Sekretariat KMK, 2004: 7).
Doubtlessly the most powerful arguments are the economic need for women’s
labour as well as better qualification of the nation’s human capital, since the
relatively poor school achievement compared to pupils in other OECD nations
(PISA study: Baumert et al., 2001) caused fear of a future lack of qualified labour.
More daily time at school is a serious intervention into children’s access to
use of time, and it has to be questioned if and in what respects it benefits
children. Recent educational discourses on that question mirror the traditional
ambivalence between the images of the playing and the learning child; the
concept of childhood as a period of playing is placed in conflict with the further
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COST A19: Germany
expansion of scholarisation. Discourses point out children’s need for a quiet
period after a long morning period of lessons and of being together with many
others, and warn not to remove children’s possibility to shape the afternoon
time on their own (see below).
From the children’s perspective we must take into account that discourses on
the concept of the child have always followed the prevailing adults’ concept of
the family; the concept of the highly sensitive child depending on motherly care
for a long period was related to the mother-at-home pattern, and has been
followed in recent times by the concept of the more robust child, related to the
pattern of a family where mothers are in the working world. Therefore
discourses which aim at respecting children’s interests will have to reflect on
the impact of traditional structures and thinking on children’s position between
the family, other care arrangements and school.
Children’s resistance to their role as pupil
From older children’s perspective, many years in school mean a long duration
of being positioned as a child: being dependent on the parent’s economy and
say as well as on the school’s regulation and control of time and activities.
Moreover, school learning is meant to provide young people with knowledge
they will need in future life, a precondition that seems being weakened, since
relevant knowledge changes very quickly.
Two ways of resistance are increasingly used by children. A small number,
mostly children from disadvantaged families, plays truant from school. In recent
times, teachers and educational policy makers have been concerned about the
growing of the number of children who seldom attend lessons. These pupils
start their ‘no-school career’ between the age of 12 and 14 (Schreiber-Kittl and
Schröpfer, 2002). In some secondary I schools these children make up four to
10 per cent of pupils. Parents are no longer blamed for their children’s
behaviour in the debates on causes and measures, as was formerly the case.
Rather, truancy is discussed as children’s reaction to a negatively experienced
school practice, and as a sign that the world of school and the world of life
outside school are drifting apart.
A different way to escape from the long-lasting childhood situation of
dependency is entering the adults’ working world besides going to school.
Pupils’ access to the working world is restricted by law. With some exceptions,
from the age of 14 children are permitted to work up to two hours per day, but
only on working days and between 8 am and 6 pm. During holidays, work is
allowed for four weeks from the age of 15. The law is often ignored. In recent
years, school-age children’s interest in transgressing the border between
schoolwork and adults’ working worlds has increased very considerably, due to
their need of money for consumer goods and for using mobile phone
749
Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
communication, as well as to their wish for transformation into a more
autonomous adult-like position. According to recent small sample studies, about
half of 14 to 16 year-olds seem to be involved, half of whom work only in the
holidays, the other half in both holidays and school term-time. Representative
statistics are rather old.
The expansion of pedagogisation and scholarisation in children’s
private lives
While the school system is only very hesitantly preparing to adjust to temporal
constraints in the children’s out-of-school lives, it traditionally intrudes on
pupil’s private time by demanding homework. The maximum amount of time is
regulated by education authorities or schools. Zinnecker and Silbereisen (1996:
27ff) account for about an hour per day needed by ten year olds, and one hour
and a quarter needed by eleven to thirteen year olds (pupils of grammar schools
needed more). Parents are supposed to check whether and how children do their
homework, and if necessary to look for and pay for private coaching. Thus
some school-related work which the school does not manage to do is loaded
onto parents – a practice that has always been problematic because it underlines
social inequality. Helping with homework often overburdens the time of parents
who are already stressed from their working times. A fifth of younger pupils get
non-parental private coaching (Avenarius et al., 2003: 91). In some socially
disadvantaged local environments, welfare organisations offer help with homework.
Adults’ wishes to keep young children in a world of play for as long and as
much as possible contradicts with adults’ efforts to provide children with as
many as possible opportunities to learn at the same time. In modern society,
which awards a high priority to work and defines the life of adults to a high
degree by their participation in the working world, children’s life has also been
included into this understanding; childhood is seen more and more comprehensively as a period of preparation for later participation in the world of work.
During the last decades educators, developmental psychologists and social
scientists have devoted attention to the learning and development potential of
children’s non-school activities, and pedagogisation has spread into children’s
whole daily life. Everything children do in the course of the day has since been
regarded as socialisation or informal learning: playing, media use, working in
the household (practising how to do one’s duty), playing with peers (social
learning) or doing paid work. Nearly all parents (97 per cent; LEGO Learning
Study, 2003: 9) say that time spent playing is also time spent learning.
The pattern of the learning child and the pattern of the playing child overlap,
and the borderlines between school and the everyday world outside school are
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COST A19: Germany
blurred. On one hand, learning has been expanded into non-school everyday life
by transforming children’s free play time into a time perceived by adults as a
learning time. On the other hand, claiming the learning outcome of all
children’s activities has allowed for introducing forms of playing into school
learning. Forms of playing have especially expanded into the methods of
primary schools. However, such a ‘de-scholarisation of school’ (Fölling-Albers,
2000) is accompanied by a much stronger tendency towards expansion of
organised learning and scholarisation within children’s lives. This happens
inside (see above) and outside the educational system.
Outside school, scholarisation of leisure time activities has been increasing
over a long period. Here, the tendency towards pedagogisation of children’s
activities is connected with parents’ wishes to provide their child with education
in addition to school, as well as with parents’ concerns about the lack of
opportunities for their child to play among children in the neighbourhood
environment and also about a lack of physical exercise. Middle class parents in
particular want their children to join in formally organised educational activities
besides school, hoping for an improvement of their career in the education
system (Zinnecker and Silbereisen, 1996; Büchner and Krüger 1996). Since the
1970s, a multitude of such offers to practise music, theatre, ballet, arts,
handicrafts, sports, language learning and computer use has arisen. Nowadays
school seems ‘to be accepted by children and by parents less in relation to
aspects of interesting or at least relevant knowledge and competence rather than
in relation to access to certificates of education, and besides that also as a more
or less interesting world of life – especially outside the achievement-oriented
lessons. Learning material that is valued as important seems to be preferred to
be gained outside of school.’ (Fölling-Albers, 2000: 123).
Such facilities are organised by a large number of institutions including sport
and other clubs, local communities, welfare organisations, churches, schools and
in recent time more and more by private companies. The largest group of
activities is for sports (see below). Since the 1990s, the number of voluntary
afternoon working groups in schools has increased, not least because schools are
in competition with each other to find enough pupils, and try to develop particular
profiles. Orchestras, choirs, theatre groups, language learning groups and more
are offered in 85 per cent of the schools at secondary I level and nearly all at
secondary II. In 2000, about 30 per cent of fifteen year-olds participated in
school-organised leisure time programmes (Baumert et al., 2003).
The only data available for examining children’s use of such provisions is
from different interview studies, each of them having investigated particular age
groups in particular regions with particular questions:
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
• 9 to 12 year-olds: 76 per cent participated in institutionalised activities, half
of these in one and the other half in several programmes (FurtnerKallmünzer et al., 2002: 40-41).
• 10 to 13 year-olds: 80 per cent had at least one weekly activity. These
children spent an average 10.2 hours per week on such activities (Zinnecker
and Silbereisen, 1996: 66).
• 10 to 15 year-olds reported more dense weekly schedules. Only six per cent said
that they had no weekly institutionalised fixture, while about 42 per cent had one
or two and about 53 per cent had three or more fixtures (Fuhs, 1996: 133).
According to all these studies, middle class children more frequently join many
club or course fixtures and at the same time meet friends more often. While 60
per cent of parents of children up to age 12 think that school time needs to be
supplemented with other planned activities to complete a child’s education, at
the same time 61 per cent of parents (much more than in the UK, USA and
France) would encourage their child to spend more time choosing what to do
freely (LEGO Learning Institute, 2003: 9-14). These data mirror parents’ ambivalence between contradictory images of the child.
Children’s places: domestication and insularisation
Ambivalences in the domestication trend
Together with scholarisation processes, urban space development has led to a
high degree of spatial separation between children’s daily lives out of school
and adults’ daily lives. Young children are endangered by motorised traffic and
the anonymous life of urban shopping areas, they are regarded as endangering,
and many places are boring for them. Local policy for children aims at the
‘child-friendly town’. A variety of specialised playgrounds for children has
been built including areas for toddlers and children, forest playgrounds and
adventure playgrounds, areas for cross cycling and football pitches, areas in
parks and in gaps between buildings. Thus children’s daily life has been bound
more and more to sheltered places specialised for children’s purposes: to the
school buildings, care and leisure time institutions, and to playing and sports
grounds. The childhood historian Ariès (1962) referred to the increasing
confinement of children in modernity that began with sending them to school.
Zinnecker (1990), following Norbert Elias, described the same trend as
domestication (Verhäuslichung) of childhood in the dual sense of the word;
most children’s activities are located in houses or areas fenced in by walls and
hedges and children’s agency is controlled by the structural power of spatial
borderlines and the size of areas.
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This spatial development is a symptom of the rise of childhood as an adultcontrolled societal structure in a differentiated modern society. This differentiation of childhood structures has been accompanied by the ideology of children
being different from adults and not yet fully belonging to the societal world but
rather to a world of free play. The discourses and policies on children’s space
are characterised by that ambivalence between control and freedom. On one
hand, pedagogists and urban developers value streets negatively as a counterspace beyond educational control and further domestication by protective and
educational measures. However on the other hand, excluding children from
public space is accompanied by complaints about the disappearance of
children’s freedom, and adults wish to concede children a pre-modern free use
of time and space in a non-educationally controlled space. This ambivalence
supports a tendency to award high value to children’s free and wild activities.
Sheltered places and arrangements are built and specialised for such activities,
thus domesticating them, for instance by providing adventure playgrounds. But
steps to de-specialise and reorganise urban space are also made in order to adapt
it to children’s motion needs, including allowing children to play on park
meadows and opening school grounds for playing in the afternoons. Trafficcalmed areas and play streets were established, and traffic education gained
high importance (see below).
The insularisation trend
From the perspective of the individual course of a day, the places which an
individual child uses in the course of a day and a week form a pattern that
reflects the centralisation and spatial fragmentation of domesticated activity
opportunities. In functionally differentiated landscapes, a child’s places of daily
life such as home, school, day care and recreation centre buildings, playgrounds, sports fields and friends’ homes are islands within space that is geared
to adults’ needs and has to be crossed by children but not used for staying there.
The archipelago of islands where an individual child can stay may consist of a
more or less large number of places, and the distances between home and other
islands may be more or less large. The degree and shape of insularisation of
children’s individual life spaces differ depending on the local infrastructure for
different age groups as well as on how the children use their opportunities,
which depends on age, gender (Nissen, 1998) and particular interests of a child
as well as on – social class-dependent – help or constraints provided by parents
(Zeiher and Zeiher, 1994; Zeiher, 2001).
Case studies show huge differences between local regions (Hössl, 2002).
Differences exist not simply between rural, suburban and inner city areas, or
between areas with a more wealthy or poorer population. Suburban and urban
regions differ to a high extent in relation to the wealth of the community and in
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relation to the local culture and the commitment of the personnel in particular
leisure facilities and in schools. There are wealthy villa areas lacking nearby
provisions for children, residential areas where even hanging around would be
boring, and old people’s areas where children’s noisy and fast-moving games
are disliked. In some inner city areas the only option may be to look for access
to institutional offers, but even there children find opportunities to meet
outdoors. Children in rural regions who live outside a village have to take into
account long travel routes and often parents’ help for transport when they take
part in a course or want to meet a friend. There are villages and small towns
where children find both natural playing areas such as woods and lakes nearby
and different kinds of sports grounds and clubs with a local tradition, and there
are suburbs and villages where middle class parents who themselves travel long
distances to work tend to support their children’s long-distance commitments.
The domestication and insularisation trends impact on children’s social life
among their peers. For most children, possibilities to play outdoors with neighbours depend on a playground nearby, and smaller children are accompanied by
an adult. Of children aged 8 to 10, only 16 per cent got to know their playmates
in the neighbourhood, but 61 per cent in school or day care; 70 per cent had
good friends whose home was in walking distance within less than 15 minutes,
but 15 per cent of them were not allowed to go there alone; 20 per cent met
friends only at school or day care (Traub, 2004). In order to meet their
playmates many children tend to make appointments for the afternoon when
they are at school together in the morning. Typically, networks of friends,
almost all of them being classmates, never meet up all together in the afternoon
– except at birthday parties – but prefer to spend their afternoons in pairs
because they feel that making appointments in a larger group would be too
complicated. Thus every afternoon throughout the urban area, a series of pairs
of children meet in separate locations, perhaps at a playground, at a swimming
pool or in one of the children’s homes.
In schools and day care institutions children spend much more time together.
And – not less important – here they enjoy meeting and playing in a larger
group which many of them miss in other parts of their daily life (Zeiher and
Zeiher, 1994). Asked what they like at school, two thirds of 10 to 18 year olds
firstly mentioned ‘friends’ (Zinnecker et al., 2003: 43). In contrast, courses are
seldom used as an occasion to make friends (Herzberg, 2001: 80). Most courses
are temporally limited to one two-hour meeting a week, and a child meets
different participants in each course he or she attends. Thus the trend of
institutionalisation of leisure facilities causes a fragmentation not only of places
but also of social relationships.
At school, peers are together in time and space day by day for several hours.
Breaks between lessons and the way to and from school are occasions for open
and self-determined social life, while teachers control what happens during the
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lessons, and social life among peers is more or less reduced to ‘back stages’. In
breaks all pupils are together in a small fenced area. Especially in the ‘long
break’ spent in the school yard, children enjoy moving around together after
having been forced to sit for a long time, they talk about their own issues, and
handle their personal conflicts (Krappmann and Oswald, 1995; Zinnecker,
2001). Some children prolong the time of being together in school. They arrive
earlier in the morning in order to talk and play with peers, or they stay together
for a while after school and play in the school yard or in a playground nearby.
The routes which connect the domains of the family and school are an inbetween space and time where and when children are reached neither by the
parents’ nor the teacher’s control. Children use this for their own social
activities. They like to expand the duration, dawdle, stay for a while in a play
area. In rural regions, school busses collect children to transport them together
in the morning and at midday. During the waiting times for the bus, temporally
and spatially located social worlds with particular rules and relations are created
(Schick, 1992). Children whose parents transport them to and from school lack
such social possibility.
The importance of school for peer relations corresponds to a growing
importance of the workplace for adults’ social life, the more social life becomes
less frequent in family and neighbourhood contexts.
Losing and reconquering urban space
Dependency on transport
Where small children live near to major roads, they are not allowed to go
outdoors without the company of an adult. Older children walk and cycle, they
depend on public transport and on parental ‘taxi service’. For both children and
teenagers, fear of crime – increasingly also committed by other young people –
is a reason, too. Children are usually not allowed to go to school alone before
the age of eight or even nine. In 1988 only a third of 8 to 12 year-olds living in
three West German regions was allowed to play outdoors wherever they liked
(Deutsches Jugendinstitut, 1992). These children also reported about their
modes of transport to afternoon clubs and courses:
Table 9. Eight to ten year olds’ ways to afternoon clubs and courses (in per cent, 1988).
By car By public transport
In a city region
10
18
In a rural area
29
1
Source: Deutsches Jugendinstitut, 1992: 156.
755
Cycling
14
27
Walking
59
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
Adults wish that children could move around on their own outdoors. Local
authorities try to make that possible through measures which diminish the
traffic danger for children. These include speed reduction in 30 km/h zones,
‘play streets’ (Spielstraßen) and cycling lanes as well as by traffic behaviour
education including instructing toddler’s parents, organising traffic security
campaigns for school beginners, older pupils helping younger ones to cross the
roads (Schülerlotsen), traffic behaviour lessons in all schools, examining all tenyear olds’ cycling behaviour, and obliging cyclists aged under eight to use
footpaths and helmets. The risk of accidents when walking or cycling is highest
in the age group of six to nine (Hautzinger et al., 1996). The rate of children
killed in road accidents has diminished continuously since 1960.
Long distances to day care and leisure facilities and to school cause need for
transport. To build large schools which gather up children from a wide area is
criticised for pedagogical reasons when younger children are involved, and for
reasons of social inequality among older children since in lower class families
transport need impacts on the decision to attend grammar school (Avenarius et
al., 2003). However in eastern German rural regions, the demographic development forces school closures and children must be transported over longer
distances.
Most children’s family life also extends over a rather large space. At weekends, many families like to take trips together, often by car and/or bicycle. On
Saturdays and Sundays, only 14 per cent of 5 to 12 year-old children in Cologne
stayed at home, half of the others travelled a long way (Kleine, 1999: 112). Due
to the length of school holidays, children presumably spend more holiday time
away from home than their parents (see above). Separated parents living in
different places also make children more mobile; some move more or less
regularly between two homes, in each of which they have their own room. Only
very seldomly do these children spend an equal amount of time at both places.
About half at age 5 to 10 and fewer older children spend every second weekend
with the parent with whom they do not live together permanently (Hater, 2004).
These arrangements and their impact on children’s lives have not yet been
investigated.
Places and motion indoors
Indoor activities are more immobile than outdoor activities. At school, children
sit in the classroom most of the time (except in sports lessons). Afternoon
leisure facilities also constrain the range of movement by fenced areas and
equipment, compared to play in open urban space. In contrast, moving possibilities at home have increased. Parents like to give the child a rather large room
furnished with slides and swings, thus making it a playground for kinds of
motion formerly executed outdoors. Moreover, due to more child-oriented
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views, in most families children are allowed to use most places in the house or
flat for games and rough play. Since playing outdoors in the neighbourhood
streets has become impossible for many children, playmates often meet at home
and sometimes like overnight visits. Almost all children have a room of their
own or shared with a sibling, and most own lots of toys, yet children often
ignore spatial separation inside the home and bring their toys into the sitting
room or do their homework at the kitchen table.
However, the trend to allow for more free movement indoors contrasts with
the fact that the home is the place of media use which makes persons sit in front
of the TV frequently. 28 per cent of 10 to 13 year-olds have their own television
set in their room (Kuchenbuch, 2003). In 2000, 3 to 13 year-olds watched television for 97 minutes on average on weekdays and 124 on Saturdays
(Feierabend and Simon, 2001: 176-188). Time spent watching TV increases
slightly with age and then decreases among teenagers. TV programmes structure the course of many small children’s evenings, and children are keen on
particular series. 3 to 13 year-olds watch TV mainly in the early evening;
between 18.45 and 20.00 every fifth child sits in front of the TV. When parents
spend much time watching TV, children do the same (Kuchenbuch, 2003).
Many children spend evening time in front of the TV because they want to be
together with their parents (Jörg, 2000).
Virtual space
By reading, listening to music, playing computer games and watching TV,
children travel into virtual worlds despite being at home physically. What
happens there is thrilling, and usually moves much faster than real life. By a trip
into virtual worlds, a child can separate her or himself from the real family
space and from what happens or does not happen there. Contrary to common
opinion, children’s reading activities (measured by the distribution of print
products) are increasing. Three quarters tend to read magazines and books,
preferring comics thereby (KidsVerbraucherAnalysen, 2002). In 2001, nearly
half of 6 to 13 year-olds possessed a Gameboy, a quarter computer games, a
quarter a video game console, a fifth their own computer, and many more
wished to get this equipment. Half of the 7 to 14 year-olds had access to the
Internet (Eckhardt et al., 2002).
Moving around in the open air
Doctors, sport educators and parents are greatly concerned about a lack of
physical exercise. In public discourses this is judged to be alarming and related
to increasing numbers of children suffering from obesity and lack of bodily
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agility, strength and persistence. However, investigations show that three
quarters of the children like and practise motion outdoors, and this is not
lessened by media use as many adults believe (Baur, et al. 2004):
• at age 4-10: 80 per cent like to play outdoors (according to their mothers)
(Noelle-Neumann and Köcher, 2002: 126),
• at age 7-13: 70 per cent enjoy moving around on bikes and 50 per cent by
inline skates and skateboards (Noelle-Neumann and Köcher, 2002: 126),
• at age 10-13: 80 per cent said that they take part in sports (Furtner-Kallmünzer et al., 2002: 54).
Traditionally, sports training is done in clubs, but children also use more and
more commercial and school programmes. In 2002, almost half of boys and 40
per cent of girls aged under 15 were sports club members (Statistisches
Bundesamt 2003a: 59, 428). The gender difference depends mainly on many
boys’ preference for football and many girls’ for horse riding. These most
frequent types of sport demand much time; football, like other team sports,
demands time for training on weekdays as well as for competitions at the
weekend, and many girls who ride also care for the horses. In recent years,
participation in organised sports has shifted to a younger age group. Now it is
highest in the age group of 10 to 13, and then decreases. Sports clubs are
changing their feature of being related to local and family traditions towards
being service agencies who offer a wide range of programmes. One symptom is
children’s increasing fluctuation between clubs and a trend to multiple
memberships (Zinnecker and Silbereisen, 1996).
Children’s sportive movement is not at all limited to training in clubs.
Children love to use child-specific vehicles for moving quickly, and use a
multitude of these including several types of bikes, skates and scooters.
Children already ride a bicycle at the age of three, and growing older they
change the bike for bigger and specialised ones such as mountain and racing
bikes. Girls use bicycles more for transport while boys also use them as sports
equipment. Hengst (1999: 27) refers to the town as ‘the most multi-faceted
sports ground’:
Looked at through the eyes of a skater, this sports ground is an accumulation of
artificial spots, streets, curbs, banks, ditches, street obstacles, half pipes, mini
ramps and more. Moreover there are sport islands such as skateboard parks or
pools. Even now, since inline skating has become very popular, you seldom meet
children who do not report about confrontations with adults. Some of them
actively seek thrill and talk about such adventures. Yet more characteristic seem
to be children’s efforts to reduce such adventures.
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Since the 1980s and progressing into the 1990s, a shift has taken place in adults’
way of looking at children’s use of urban space. A need for urban space which
in fits with children’s particular movement activities is recognised without
trying to domesticate such activities at special places. Local authorities want
young people to participate in the processes of developing measures in order to
improve the urban infrastructure; local youth parliaments are the forum for such
participation. As Hengst (1999: 28) states, the children tend to be less
committed to more rights to use the ‘sports ground town’, rather they wish to
get new places specialised for activities they prefer at the time. Thus they prefer
more functional separation in space and more domestication. Resignation might
be a reason, but the children also recognise the advantages of specialised places,
‘the high quality of the equipment, the stimulating atmosphere and the variety
of possible sport activities’.
Temporal autonomy and control
After reporting what children do in their time let us now shift the perspective to
the ways of deciding on time use. Children’s time use – like all people’s time
use –are shaped in different ways including letting processes evolve their own
intrinsic time, rational timing of one’s own activities by co-ordination and
planning in a more or less long time horizon, acting in a temporally spontaneous
way when a new possibility arises, adapting actions to an already existing time
regime or particular date set by others or by oneself. Children’s ways of
handling time – their temporal agency – are connected to the time structures and
to the time use that they experience and are supposed to adapt to in their various
environments.
Shaping leisure time autonomously
Playing time develops in the process of doing without being regulated by an
external time regime – that is the meaning of playing, and doubtless that is one
main way a child behaves when he or she plays. However before play with
peers begins, a particular way of time use is often suitable in order to meet each
other at a place and time which depends on environmental features. Children
who often meet in the afternoon produce a collective way of organising their
meetings temporally, thereby reacting to activity possibilities and constraints in
the area and in their families (Zeiher and Zeiher, 1994).
If the neighbourhood is appropriate, a child just goes outdoors and looks if
anybody is already there. In such case no time organisation is necessary, and
time is shaped by spatial movement, by visual perception and by walking to
places; all of these activities are temporally spontaneous. One precondition for
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such a way of handling time is attractive places which are located nearby and
immediately available. Until the 1960s most neighbourhoods were appropriate
for that kind of time and space use, while nowadays many children have to meet
at special places including play and sports grounds or recreation centres where
no need to plan curbs the users’ temporal spontaneity. Yet not many children
live in close vicinity to such possibilities.
Meeting at a more distant place demands an appointment. Thus, in order not
to be alone in the afternoon, many children have to engage in planning time
each on their own, and anticipate, initiate and co-ordinate meetings with peers.
Their social life is organised more in the medium of time than by looking
around in space. Young children practise this way of shaping time from a rather
early age in kindergarten. These children handle their time rather autonomously,
however that makes them rather dependent on their parents who help to manage
the time schedule and on being transported to the appointed place.
Since nearly all households are on the telephone (in western Germany since
the late 1960s, in eastern Germany since 1991), appointments with peers made
in the morning at school are usually confirmed later by phone, and usually a
phone call is made before going to a friend’s house. The mobile phone has
relieved phone communication from spatial fixation. Peers may be reached at
any time wherever they are, and appointments can be made or changed at any
time when a new situation, a need or an idea occurs. Whether and how
children’s ways of organising their peer relations are going to be changed by
use of mobile phone calls and SMS, and whether the time horizon of leisure
management has been shortened, has not yet been investigated. It may be that
long term planning becomes supplemented or even replaced by more ‘just in
time’ production of daily life. From the start of the new technology, children
and teenagers have been keen on owning a mobile phone in order to manage
their peer relations by call or SMS. The number of owners increases so quickly
that statistics soon become outdated.
Many leisure time courses are temporally restricted by the need for booking
in advance and fixed dates, and the activities are temporally structured by
trainers and teachers more or less as they are in schools. Here, children also
experience given time structures for their activities. However, leisure time
arrangements are offers made to children. Children are not forced to go there
but rather enticed by the arrangement specialising in activities they like to do.
They decide on their own whether to participate. Case study research points to
children who, despite being keen on a particular activity, did not join a course in
order not to lose their temporal freedom. For them a prerequisite for using
leisure facilities was that time is left open to their own decision. Others
defended their temporal autonomy against institutional attempts to restrict it by
attending too early or too late, irregularly or not at all (Zeiher, 2003; Zeiher and
Zeiher, 1994). Children’s inclination to open time has been noted in the realm
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of sport, too. Research into young people’s sport preferences shows a trend
away from traditional athletic training that is strictly time-regulated along a
given scheme towards a growing preference for individual performance of
sporting skills. The latter is practised in streets and areas using skates or special
bikes (Alkemeyer, 2003; Rusch and Thiemann, 1998).
At home: handling time in many ways
In family life, children experience a mixture of different ways of handling time,
each depending on the activity and the sphere of life which is involved at the
particular moment. On one hand, families react to the increasing temporal
complexity by relieving daily life from traditional time structures. Instead of the
traditional regular common midday meal, some children eat lunch at their afterschool day care centre or their grandmother’s home. Coming home from school,
older children warm up a ready-made meal or wait for a parent’s return. And
instead of the traditional time schedule for household work, families find their
own rhythms which are easily changed according to occurring situations. On the
other hand many families react by establishing one certain fixed-time common
meal per day or at least at the weekend, in order to make sure they have a
common communication time. Children usually persist in such rituals (Klenner
et al., 2003).
Thus at home children experience the strong power of time regimes and of
occasional time restrictions that are set in the outer world and reign over their
parents as well as over themselves. But they also experience that many things
are done just in time and at any time around the clock, and that family time
fixations are self-made and changeable and not mighty, externally set rules.
Such contradictory experiences may help them to be able to handle time more
autonomously. Yet children’s – especially younger children’s – need for reliable
times is often not fulfilled; children say that they sometimes suffer from this
(Roppelt, 2003, Klenner et al., 2003). As far as possible most parents tend to
respect children’s interests, and children participate in negotiations on family
times. The habit of negotiating instead of giving orders to children is widely
spread, and embedded in a trend towards de-hierarchising child-adult relations.
However, parents tend to stick strictly to certain time regulations. Making
children go to bed earlier than adults (depending on their age) is part of the
educational culture which seems not to have been changed by the trend to
temporal de-regulation. During the week, ten year-olds tend to go to bed on
average at about nine and tend to sleep nine to ten hours. Arguments about
bedtime regulation are frequent, since children do not accept being excluded
from their parents’ activities in the later evening. Prolonged evening time is a
sign of growing up children fight for. About three quarters of 10 to 13 year-olds
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Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe
report discussions with parents on the set bedtime, and about two thirds of them
said that the conflicts are serious (Zinnecker and Silbereisen, 1996: 32 ff.).
The time for coming home in the evening is also seen by children as an
important sign of growing up. Here, arguments are fewer and negotiations are
more common. In order to reach their child at any time and place, parents buy
them a mobile phone. Set appointments for coming home can be changed, and
both parents and child feel more secure when they can always reach each other.
According to a study on the impact of the mobile phone on parent-child
relations, 12 to 16 year-olds prefer to give information on coming home later in
the evening by SMS rather than by call, as they like to avoid parents controlling
and constraining them (Logemann and Feldhaus, 2002).
Conflicts are frequently evoked when children do not tidy their own room,
an activity of which children may determine the temporal placing more or less
on their own, yet in a given time interval. More than 80 per cent of 10 to 13
year-olds reported discussions with parents and more than half of these serious
arguments (Zinnecker and Silbereisen, 1996: 25; 419). Most parents stick to that
task although they do not include children in much housework (Zeiher, 2000a).
Changing features of household work and its timing have diminished the need
and the occasions for children’s help. However, in line with the pedagogisation
trend, parents like to give their children some duties in their own responsibility
so that they can practise how to be conscious of fulfilling them. Usually an
important duty is tidying their own room, besides emptying the dishwasher or
the rubbish bin.
In school: being forced into an obsolete time regime
The usual organisation of time in school contradicts rather sharply with
children’s many experiences of handling time more autonomously, individually
and according to the respective situation. At all times, the school time regime
has corresponded to the form of temporal organisation of industrial and
bureaucratic work. The Taylorist method of fragmenting working time and
forcing workers to adapt to the set structure and speed was also used for the
temporal organisation of learning in school. Even nowadays, 45-minute
intervals and detailed sequences of fragmented learning materials and steps of
learning prescribe the temporal processes of learning in the same way for all
pupils of a class. In the working world such types of time regime are becoming
increasingly obsolete. For as much as three decades, individual workers’ ‘time
sovereignty’ has been debated, and in recent times set working time structures
are being transformed to flexible ones and replaced by individual control of
one’s own time. However, the method of structuring learning time at school has
not changed much until now, although this has been much criticised in reform
discourses. Working in ‘epochs’ and on projects rather than in temporally
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fragmented forms is practised in many schools at all levels, however not very
frequently (Avenarius et al., 2003: 150). Most reform of teaching methods has
taken place in primary schools (Heinzel, 2002), but even here traditional time
structures are still usual.
According to qualitative research, children become aware of the many ways
time can be used and are thus able to reflect the power of given time structures
and to resist it. Choosing ways of handling time which are suitable to the
respective goal or situation, and being aware of that practice, many children
take exception to time regimes which they feel to be arbitrary or counterproductive to their aimed activities. What children desire has been formulated
by a ten-year old girl (Zeiher, 2000b). She compared the strict time structure of
her primary school to the temporal conditions of her parents’ work: ‘To leave
parts of time free for yourself, to allow yourself a break from time to time,... to
choose on your own what issue you start on’.
The initiated implementation of more all-day schools offers an opportunity
to adapt the time organisation of school learning to the ways time is
increasingly handled in contemporary society. In a prolonged school day, new
ways of time organisation become possible. An alternative to the Tayloristic
organisation could be to offer more possibilities than before for pupils to follow
their own rhythms of learning and to dispose of more learning time on their
own. Many teachers may be ready to try alternative forms of work organisation
but it also needs money for more teachers and buildings. A need for more
flexible and more individualised ways of shaping learning time in school
presumably may grow from two sides. On the side of the children, reforms
might more and more become necessary in order to improve pupils’ motivation
for school learning. On the side of economy, such reforms are important in
order to produce human capital which is adequate to the spreading new
temporal forms of work in the working world.
A short conclusion
The central thesis of this study is that the welfare of children in Germany is
influenced to a high extend by a clear discrepancy between children’s real forms
of living on one hand, and the institutional framework of children’s lives on the
other. German society and the German welfare state are considered ‘structurally
indifferent’ towards children and families. Up to the early eighties of the 20th
century the German welfare state was a ‘social insurance state’ centred on
gainful employment; it was transfer-intensive and showed a weak children and
family policy component.
Since then there has been a far reaching change of the patterns of everyday
life. Changed gender roles, changed patterns of distribution of labour and
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increasing labour market participation of mothers are causing a care crisis. The
traditional mix of joint responsibility of society and family, and of the mother
and father for education, care and raising of children comes to a clash with the
changed reality of family life and gender roles. Additionally, the western
German model of family-based care combined with part-time work on the
mother’s side has clashed with the eastern German model of public child care
with a high rate of full-time employment by the mother. What do these social
trends mean for the welfare and everyday lives of children? The study analyses
children’s views of care and the care crisis and the societal trends which have an
impact on the spatial and temporal dimensions of children’s lives – i.e. the
blurring boundaries of family and work, the expansion of pedagogisation and
scholarisation in children’s private lives and the domestication and insularisation trends. It is pointed out that the political-institutional framework is in a
transformation process but institutions will change at a snail’s pace only. The
consequences of the resulting lag have to be mastered by children and their
parents in their private arrangements of everyday live.
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