Childcare allowance

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Childcare allowance for births between January 1, 1986 and December 31, 2006 was a compensation payment from the German state for one of the parents who primarily raised the child . It has been replaced by parental allowance for children born on or after January 1, 2007 .

Eligibility requirement

The parent who wanted childcare allowance was only allowed to work part-time for a maximum of 30 hours per week. Schoolchildren and students as parents, however, were allowed to pursue their professional training in full. Certain income limits were not allowed to be exceeded.

The details of childcare allowance were regulated in the Federal Childcare Allowance Act, as were those of childcare leave .

Amount and duration

When it was introduced in 1986, the amount and duration of the childcare allowance was set at DM 600 for ten months. In 1988 the benefit period was extended to twelve months. The duration of the parental allowance was gradually increased up to two years. Since 1998 you have been able to decide whether you want to receive the standard amount for a maximum of 24 months or the so-called budgeted childcare allowance for a maximum of twelve months in a larger amount. In 2003 the standard amount was € 307, the budgeted childcare allowance € 460; As of January 1, 2004, the amounts were reduced to € 300 and € 450.

With the consent of the employer, it was possible to split the parental leave into two parts and take a year between the child's third and eighth year.

State education allowance

Some federal states voluntarily paid state childcare allowance when they were 2 or 3 years old. The legal basis is the corresponding state laws. In Baden-Württemberg there was a state education allowance for children born up to September 30, 2012, and in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for children born up to May 1, 2002. The state education allowance in Thuringia could be claimed for children who were born up to June 30, 2015. In Bavaria, it was combined with the childcare allowance to form family allowances in September 2018. Currently (as of March 2020) it is only paid in Saxony.

Livelihood security

For single parents with infants under three years of child-raising allowance provided a livelihood-securing financial situation just above the poverty line ago, child-raising allowance, unlike all other forms of income, not on social assistance was taken into account. In the transition to the later parental allowance, this situation remained insofar as the basic amount of € 300 was not offset against unemployment benefit II , although the amount and duration of the support were reduced. The savings package decided in 2010 means that the parental allowance has been fully offset against unemployment benefit II since 2011.

criticism

It was criticized that the child-raising allowance placed housewives significantly better than before, that working mothers discriminated against disadvantaged and single mothers. According to the sociologist Christoph Butterwegge , mothers should be motivated by the childcare allowance to concentrate on family work for several years and to withdraw from gainful employment for this purpose. The regulations were described in the magazine Emma as a “mother's trap” because mothers who exhausted this leeway were “practically eliminated as competition for positions with opportunities for advancement”; As an alternative, it was proposed to convert the rigid three-year rule for parental leave into a time account that can be split over several years so that, for example, both parents could work part-time for six years.

history

In 1986, the child-raising allowance replaced the maternity leave allowance previously granted , which at that time amounted to 510 DM per month, but to which previously only working women were entitled and which was only paid for six months. Parental leave and parental allowance were designed based on the family model of the provident marriage in its modernized form, and after the law came into force, parental allowance was almost exclusively used by women.

The federal child- raising allowance has been replaced by the parental allowance for children born on or after January 1, 2007 . In this respect, the period in which the childcare allowance was paid ended in early 2009 at the latest.

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: Erziehungsgeld  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Axel Schildt: Inner development of the Federal Republic until 1989. In: Information on political education (Issue 270). Federal Agency for Civic Education, accessed on June 25, 2010 . Section "Social Policy"
  2. ^ A b Wolfgang Erler: Single parents in Germany: The career of a topic in research and social policy. (PDF; 42 kB) DJI, accessed on June 25, 2010 . , Footnote p. 2 f.
  3. ↑ Sonja Dörfler: Family policy measures to compensate for childcare benefits - a European comparison. (PDF) In: Working Paper No. 22. Austrian Institute for Family Research, 2002, accessed on June 25, 2010 . , P. 5.
  4. ↑ l-bank.de ( Memento from May 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Erler: Single parents in Germany: The career of a topic in research and social policy. (PDF; 42 kB) DJI, accessed on June 25, 2010 . , P. 3.
  6. ↑ Annemarie Mennel: Education allowance. Or: How the father state wants to raise mothers. Emma , September 1985, archived from the original on February 16, 2009 ; Retrieved January 24, 2009 .
  7. ↑ Christoph Butterwegge u. A .: Child poverty in East and West Germany. 2nd edition, Gabler Wissenschaftsverlage, 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15915-7 , p. 100.
  8. ↑ Gunhild Gutschmidt: The mother trap. (No longer available online.) Emma , 1997, archived from the original on February 16, 2009 ; Retrieved January 24, 2009 .
  9. ↑ Sonja Munz: Employment of women in the field of tension between changed life plans and welfare state regulations. ifo Schnelldienst 50, Issue 23, pp. 21–35, 1997, (online version). Archived from the original on February 16, 2009 ; Retrieved January 24, 2009 .