Parental home education in Germany

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The childhood home education in Germany is of a variety often highly contradictory today education concepts and parenting styles influenced.

history

First wave of reform pedagogy

In the 20th century, educational reform ideas spread increasingly among the educated classes of the population. The progressive education can be used as part of the Reform Movement describe justify since the late 19th century, new forms of life, housing, work, art and culture to occult teachings and wanted to create a new man, brought about by a new type of education should be. The otherwise rather inconsistent pedagogical reform approaches were linked by four common basic convictions: that upbringing must 1. be based on the needs of the child and 2. on its "natural development", that it 3. strengthen the child's principle of independent activity and 4. should enable autonomous self-administration. Reform educational movements existed in other countries too, such as the United States ; Characteristic for Germany was a pronounced protest attitude, which mainly worked through the bureaucratic Herbartianism . Parents who sent their children to the Odenwald school (since 1910), to Waldorf schools (since 1919), to Montessori institutions (in Germany since 1919), to the Schloss Salem school (since 1920) or to Jenaplan schools (since 1923) shared the ideas of reform pedagogy and mostly rejected the curricula and timetables for their child that are usual in the public school system.

time of the nationalsocialism

Working family in front of the radio (1933)

The educational policy of the National Socialist regime aimed at the suppression of autonomous parental home education through the more or less direct educational influence of state and party .

The National Socialist educational norms, which were concisely formulated in Johanna Haarer's advisory literature , were already conveyed to pregnant women and mothers of small children through the mothers' training courses run by the Nazi women's association and the welfare programs of the mother and child aid organization . Up until the beginning of the Second World War - not least in view of a pronounced mother cult - the upbringing at home, at least for toddlers and preschoolers, had not yet been shaken. This changed to the extent that women were needed as labor during the boom that war preparations led to in the late 1930s.

Since the establishment of the Reich Ministry of Education (1934), the schools had understood themselves as institutions for military education. In addition to the general education schools , the regime ran numerous Nazi elite schools , which were organized as boarding schools and were intended to prepare for service in the Wehrmacht or party.

The 10 to 14 year olds, who were initially able to voluntarily join the German Jungvolk or Jungmädelbund , have been legally obliged to do so since 1939. The same applied to membership of 14 to 18-year-olds in the Hitler Youth or in the Association of German Girls . In contrast to the Bündische Jugend , from which the National Socialist youth organizations developed, the latter relied on the educational influence of the peer group (“Youth should be led by youth”); As Gisela Miller-Kipp pointed out, this was tantamount to a termination of the pedagogical generation relationship. The "youth service obligation" could be enforced against the will of the parents by the police. In school and in the Hitler Youth, children were asked to contact their parents if they were B. listened to foreign radio stations to denounce .

Second wave of reform pedagogy

Reform pedagogy took on new impulses when, in the 1960s, humanities pedagogy was replaced by critical educational science . Similar to the supporters of the life reform movement, the 68ers strove for fundamentally new forms of life freed from authoritarian patterns, which they in turn hoped to be able to realize through education. Anti-authoritarian education emerged as a very heterogeneous concept , which from 1967 onwards led to the children's shop movement and mainly reached young, educated urban families. In 1975 the anti-pedagogy followed , which found very few followers with its creed that children do not need any education at all. The magazine Eltern has been published in Germany every week since 1966 , and it presented the younger currents of reform pedagogy to a large audience. The alternative schools with a reform pedagogical character (e.g. Freie Schule Frankfurt , 1975), which initially only led a niche existence , proved to be the most permanent institution that emerged from the spirit of optimism of the time . A real “run” on this type of school did not begin until the early 1990s, when education and career-oriented parents in Germany generally began to show a growing selectivity when choosing a school.

German Democratic Republic

Mother with son in East Berlin (1974)

In the GDR , the guiding principle was that both parents worked full-time. Because women were able to take leave of work for a maximum of 1 year after the birth of a child, the great majority of 1- to 5-year-olds spent the whole day in day nurseries and kindergartens . Because of the considerable amount of time children spent with professional educators, home education was closely linked to institutional education. While educational reform concepts were becoming more widespread in the Federal Republic of Germany, upbringing in the GDR was shaped not only by many rules, but also by socialist pedagogy . The family code stipulated programmatically:

"It is the most important task of parents to educate their children in trusting cooperation with state and social institutions to be healthy and cheerful, capable and well-educated people, to be active builders of socialism."

- Family Code of the German Democratic Republic , Section 3, Paragraph 1

The state institutions set educational standards that could hardly be ignored by parents, such as B. the schools in which corporal punishment had already been abolished in 1949 . Parents' guidebooks were also controlled by the political system, such as the magazine Elternhaus und Schule, which appeared in East Berlin from 1952 to 1990.

Framework conditions and statistics

Legal Regulations

The right and duty of parents to bring up their children has been regulated in the Basic Law in Germany since 1949:

“Care and upbringing of children are the natural right of parents and their first and foremost duty. The state community watches over their activities. "

- Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany , Article 6 , Paragraph 2

In contrast to the GDR Family Code, there is no definition of educational goals. The sentence “The state community watches over their activities” relates to the best interests of the child . The youth welfare offices can monitor parental homes and, if a threat to the best interests of the child is suspected, suggest that a family court temporarily or permanently withdraws the parents' upbringing and welfare rights.

The scope of parental rights is restricted by other laws. Examples:

Parental home situation

In Germany in 2015 approximately 11,408,000 were families (d. H. Child Communities parents) counted. 2,331,000 (20.4%) of these were families with single mothers; 409,000 (3.6%) were families with single fathers.

According to a study published in 2018 based on diary logs of 665 couple households with at least one child under the age of 10 and on data from the time use survey by the Federal Statistical Office from 2012/2013, female partners in families with active fathers spend more time looking after children, not less on. The researchers interpret their results as confirmation of a trend towards an intensification of parenthood : Despite the decreasing number of children and a longer stay of children in daycare or school, both mothers and fathers are spending increasing amounts of time on childcare.

In many families, the grandparents also raise their children . In 2008, 30% of grandmothers looked after their grandchildren at least once a week. It was around a quarter of the grandfathers. 60% of grandmothers and more than half of grandfathers have looked after their grandchildren at least occasionally. 85% of grandparents lived no more than 25 kilometers from their underage grandchildren.

In 2016, 70,000 children and adolescents did not live with their parents but with relatives, mainly with grandparents (approx. 70%), less often with uncles and aunts (approx. 20%) or their own adult siblings (5%). Another 66,000 minors were placed in homes and 52,000 in foster families .

Parental employment

In 2015, 62.1% of all parents with children under the age of 6 were employed. Of the employed fathers with children under 6 years of age, 93.7% were in full-time employment; 6.4% worked part-time. Of the employed mothers with children of the same age, only 26.9% were in full-time employment; 73.1% worked part-time.

After the birth of a child, employed women in Germany can take 8 weeks of paid maternity leave , which increases to 12 weeks in the case of premature or multiple births. A corresponding paternity leave , as it is z. B. exists in Denmark , does not exist in Germany. Since 2001, employees of both sexes have also been able to take parental leave; This entitlement, which is intended to make it easier to combine family and work , enables parents to take up to 36 months of unpaid leave during the first three years of each child's life without having to fear dismissal. Father and mother can split these 36 months between themselves.

In 2015 just under 2% of fathers whose youngest child was under 6 years of age were on parental leave. This was the case for almost a quarter of the mothers.

Day care

Of the children under one year of age, 2.5% took advantage of an institutional daycare offer ( western Germany : 2.2%, eastern Germany : 3.9%). 36.1% of the one year olds and 60.6% of the two year olds were in day care. Since 2013, parents in Germany have had a legal right to place their children in a day care center from the age of two , although this care is subject to a fee.

Almost 43,500 people were employed as child minders in 2016 and looked after a total of 153,000 children. The number of au pair girls and boys who come to Germany from abroad and look after the children of their host family there for 6–12 months is estimated at 60,000 per year.

Problems typical of the time

Inadequate or completely absent education

Many paediatricians and pedagogues who observe the results of home education in their professional practice have described how this education is often inadequate: "The parents are often helpless [when the child behaves problematically] and do not know what to do." Very different factors are named as the suspected causes of inadequate or completely lacking education:

  • Compassion for the child who will experience more than enough coercion and hardship in adult life,
  • lack of assertiveness,
  • Convenience,
  • Exhaustion,
  • Uncertainty about what can be expected of children,
  • the feeling that you can never do enough for the child,
  • Accelerated social change that unsettles parents about which skills will be in demand tomorrow.

A fundamental uncertainty among parents about how children should be brought up today has been described again and again. The main reason given for this uncertainty is a loss of social consensus about “good” upbringing. Parents also no longer fall back on the example of their own parents, by whom they were once brought up. How u. a. Axel Becker has described, many parents, who are deterred by the example of their own parents, generally reject responsibility for upbringing and accept not to bring up their children at all. The authoritarian upbringing , from which such parents categorically distance themselves, still exists in some isolated cases in Germany today, especially in the less educated classes.

Educational goal of independence

Around 2000 , a discourse about the lack of education for independence emerged in the German-speaking area, driven by Albert Wunsch among others .

The Difficult Term "Authority"

As the Swedish psychiatrist David Eberhard has criticized, many parents turn to democratic-partnership approaches such as that of the popular Danish family therapist Jesper Juul in the educational vacuum . Relevant research literature suggests that children thrive best under an authoritative parenting style ; Juul's writings do not reveal any confrontation with these research findings. However, other authors have doubted that parents whose experience and authority are not recognized by the child can teach that child anything at all. Bernhard Bueb takes a radical position , who justifies his concept of authority in a Christian way : "Man is a" fallen "nature, he unites good and bad, he needs more than just accompaniment, he needs guidance in order to learn to understand the good in to strengthen oneself and to curb evil. ” Albert Wunsch also presented an alternative to the educational laissez-faire, formulated from elements of Christian upbringing and positive psychology ( Farewell to Fun Pedagogy , 2003), who - like Bueb - blames for blames modern educational problems of the 68 movement . The psychiatrist Michael Winterhoff is one of the few German-speaking authors who have published research-oriented educational guides on the subject of parenting authority .

Intense Mothering and New Momism

Another factor for problematic upbringing is the parents' high demands on themselves or the wish to do everything perfectly in their upbringing. Particularly ambitious mothers of newborn children decide e.g. For example, it is common to practice attachment parenting , which is about carefully reading the child's signals and precisely meeting their needs. In practice, this educational philosophy degenerated that because of extreme enslavement of women as in English-speaking Intensive Mothering ( "Intensive Motherhood") and New momism ( "New mom-ism") is referred to, easy to overprotect with results as insufficient independence and child resilience , and the years of postponing their own needs, mothers become prone to depression .

Educational advice

Parenting advice can be used free of charge in Germany. It is offered by various municipal institutions and other non-profit organizations such as the Caritas Association or the AWO ; Names and addresses are u. a. found on the internet. Families seeking advice can also find help from school psychologists , resident psychologists or family therapists . The first point of contact are also paediatricians , after-school and kindergarten teachers and teachers .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Rudolf Tippelt: Reform pedagogy . In: Elisabeth Zwick (Hrsg.): Spiegel der Zeit. Basic course historical pedagogy III: Renaissance to the present . Lit, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-10269-0 , pp. 191–210, here: p. 191 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  2. ^ Rudolf Tippelt: Reform pedagogy . In: Elisabeth Zwick (Hrsg.): Spiegel der Zeit. Basic course historical pedagogy III: Renaissance to the present . Lit, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-10269-0 , pp. 191–210, here: p. 192 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  3. ↑ Yvonne Schymura: ”The mother's cross is my dearest wish”. In: Der Spiegel. May 11, 2014, accessed April 2, 2017 .
  4. ^ Leonore Ansorg: Children in the class struggle. The history of the pioneer organizations from 1948 to the end of the fifties . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-05-003117-4 , pp. 207 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ↑ Arnold Frey Sold: military education as a task of high school . In: Weltanschauung and school . tape 3 , 1939, pp. 102-107 .
  6. ↑ Gisela Miller-Kipp: "Youth should be led by youth". Forms and consequences of the termination of the pedagogical generation relationship, for example in anti-pedagogy, in the German youth movement and in National Socialism . In: Eckart Liebau, Christoph Wulf (Hrsg.): Generation. Attempts on a pedagogical-anthropological basic condition . Deutscher Studienverlag, Weinheim 1996, ISBN 978-3-89271-687-7 , p. 286-303 .
  7. ^ Christian Hartmann: Wehrmacht in the Eastern War. Front and military hinterland 1941/42 . 2nd Edition. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-70225-5 , p. 99 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. ↑ Denunciation. In: www.museenkoeln.de. Retrieved April 2, 2017 . Jürgen Müller-Hohagen: Synchronization and denunciation. Disciplining parents over their children . In: Ute Benz, Wolfgang Benz (ed.): Socialization and Traumatization. Children in the time of National Socialism . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 978-3-596-11067-4 .
  9. ^ Rudolf Tippelt: Reform pedagogy . In: Elisabeth Zwick (Hrsg.): Spiegel der Zeit. Basic course historical pedagogy III: Renaissance to the present . Lit, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-10269-0 , pp. 191–210, here: p. 193 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  10. ↑ Private schools in Germany are booming. In: Der Spiegel. March 16, 2005, accessed March 30, 2017 .
  11. ^ A b Susanne Kailitz: When Mutti goes to work early. In: The time. March 3, 2011, accessed March 29, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Family Code of the German Democratic Republic. Retrieved March 29, 2017 .
  13. ↑ If the teacher's name is Drakon. In: Der Spiegel. June 8, 2009. Retrieved March 29, 2017 .
  14. ↑ Inventory - Journals. Retrieved March 29, 2017 . Gesine Obertreis: Family Policy in the GDR 1945-1980 . Springer, Wiesbaden 1986, ISBN 978-3-8100-0566-3 , pp.
     96 ( limited preview in Google Book search). Sabine Jahn: Reflections on education in popular science guides . 2012, p.
     7 ( Download [PDF] dissertation, Weingarten University of Education).
  15. ↑ Child protection and state guardianship. Retrieved April 2, 2017 .
  16. ↑ Andreas Fasel: The principle of humiliation. February 21, 2012, accessed April 2, 2017 .
  17. ↑ Uwe Bahnsen: When the cane disappeared from the schools. In: world. March 15, 2009, accessed April 2, 2017 . Thorsten Harmsen: Stick blows in schools. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. March 9, 2012, accessed April 2, 2017 .
  18. ↑ Number of families in Germany. Retrieved March 28, 2017 .
  19. ↑ Number of single parents in Germany by gender. Retrieved March 28, 2017 .
  20. ↑ Parents strive for more family time. In: press release. German Youth Institute, May 9, 2018, accessed December 9, 2018 .
  21. ↑ Angelika Dietrich: "Grandma, you are my friend". In: The time. June 5, 2008, accessed March 29, 2017 .
  22. ↑ Joachim Göres: When grandma has to replace mother. In: taz. June 25, 2016. Retrieved March 29, 2017 . Joachim Göres: Relatives care: To grandma instead of the home. In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. September 27, 2015, accessed March 29, 2017 .
  23. ↑ a b Parents who work part-time. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 29, 2017 ; accessed on March 28, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.destatis.de
  24. ↑ People on parental leave. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on April 12, 2016 ; accessed on March 28, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.destatis.de
  25. ↑ Current statistical data on day care. Retrieved March 28, 2017 .
  26. ↑ Cordula Eubel: In future with legal entitlement. In: Der Tagesspiegel. July 31, 2013, accessed March 28, 2017 .
  27. ↑ The number of children in care is growing. Retrieved March 29, 2017 .
  28. ↑ Au-pair health insurance in Germany. Retrieved March 29, 2017 .
  29. ↑ a b c d e f Ariane Breyer: Completely detached. In: The time . March 2, 2017. Retrieved March 28, 2017 .
  30. ↑ a b Jeannette Otto (interviewer), David Eberhard: “This is how we pull snot spoons”. In: The time. March 26, 2015, accessed March 28, 2017 .
  31. ↑ Tatort family: "At the stand of a two-year-old". In: Der Spiegel. May 4, 2010, accessed on March 28, 2017 (interview with Michael Winterhoff ). Nicol Ljubic: Let go of the leash! In: The time. October 7, 2014, accessed March 28, 2017 . Karl Lenz, Sylka Scholz: The idealized child . In: Sylka Scholz, Karl Lenz, Sabine Dreßler (eds.): In love connected. Couple Relationships and Parenting in Popular Counselors from the 1950s to Today . transcript, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-8376-2319-2 , p.

     257–274, here p. 262 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  32. ↑ Axel Becker: The tolerance trap. What limitless liberality does to us and our children . Beltz, Weinheim 2016, ISBN 978-3-407-86411-6 .
  33. ↑ Wendy Mogel : The Blessings of a Skinned Knee : Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children . Scribner, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore 2001, ISBN 0-684-86297-2 , pp. 61–88 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  34. ↑ On the Art of Education. In: The time. March 1, 2007, accessed on March 28, 2017 (dispute between Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Bernhard Bueb).
  35. ↑ Bernhard Bueb: Praise of the discipline. A polemic . Ullstein, 2008, ISBN 978-3-548-36930-3 . Criticism: Michaela Schmid: Erziehungsratgeber und Erziehungswissenschaft . On the theory-practice problem of popular educational writings. Klinkhardt, 2010, ISBN 978-3-7815-1782-0 , pp.
     344 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  36. ↑ Emma Jenner: The Perils of Attachment Parenting. In: The Atlantic. August 10, 2014, accessed March 28, 2017 .