this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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In Germany it's something like 260€ per month until the child turns 25 if still in education (university, apprenticeship) (26/27 if the child served one or two years as a soldier or in a social or climate project)
And yeah birth rates didn't increase either AFAIK
It's been in place in more or less its current form since 1975, have a graph. Colours are generally for 1-4th child if there's a fifth one then that's a tax deduction. Before that there were schemes but they would not kick in for the first child and generally speaking it was even more of a pittance. In primary school, in the 80s, our maths teacher actually did a run-down of how much that money didn't pay for our new shoes.
That's West Germany in the east they spent a lot on free daycare which seems to have had much better results. Plenty of states nowadays do have free daycare at least for poor parents, and generally make the fees income-dependent, but the level of service still isn't anywhere like it was in the GDR where you could also offload school-age kids to the state when they had holidays, summer camps and stuff, but you didn't. Which isn't exactly rare kids get more holidays than workers.
Overall, the reason our birthrate is only stabilised at a low level instead of at a reasonable level is because conservatives care more about supporting family models few people want than about solving the issue. Nah not even "conservatives", it's specifically Catholic conservatives.
And, no, I'm not advocating for re-introducing the FDJ, blue scarves and everything. How about handing organisations like the Scouts some money so they can offer summer camps for pretty much the cost of food. It'd be mostly money to allow adults to not work while running those camps (that is, extend their holidays) as well as some materiel costs. Increased tent wear.
Accessible social programs for vacations and the like is something we definitely need, if only to stabilise the youth from turning criminal and/or radicalised.
As for your guess that the higher birth rates in the east are due to free child care, I think the fact that flats were handed out preferentially to families with kids was the more significant factor. And that seems to have become something of a normal lifemodel as I still this. Longer education and entry into a stable career is also a big factor.
Yep on second thought I don't think it's so much stable career or the availability of childcare as security overall, any way to answer "We can do this for 18 years no matter what" in the positive. And yes that's where capitalism and CDU bashing of "lazy moochers" strikes hard. Having a different job every six months and occasionally none would be right up many people's alley if it didn't put you into all sorts of economic trouble.
And the "we can do this for 18 years no matter what" thing was easy in the GDR: Don't do things the Stasi doesn't like, done. The SED went to great lengths ensuring that if you kept your head down, and push come to shove are willing to fill a hole another is digging (because duty to work), you really didn't have to worry.