Day care trends for children under three years in Germany

Abstract

To facilitate the combination of employment and family care for parents in Germany, the provision of state-subsidised Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services for children aged under three years has expanded massively since 2005 (Spiess 2011). In combination with a new parental leave policy since 2007, this policy change suggests that Germany has been diverging from its previous trajectory as a conservative welfare state, in which family and labour market policies predominantly promoted a traditional or modified male breadwinner family model. This policy process has been subject to tensions and the individual policies have been shaped by party positions as well as intra-party conflicts (Leitner, 2010). In contrast to many other European countries, the economic crisis in 2008 has not undermined these policy developments. In this chapter, I provide an overview of developments in ECEC policy and associated trends in maternal employment and take-up of ECEC services. I extend the literature by complementing these with new analyses of trends in informal care for children under three and of temporal and regional variations in the structure and employment conditions of the ECEC workforce in Germany. This aims to improve our understanding of the extent to which care for young children is being shifted from parents - mainly mothers - or informal caregivers to formal providers and whether this may challenge the long established ideal of maternal care for young children in West Germany.