“The family policy of the Federal Government is anti-child and ideological”, said the Bishop of Augsburg, Walter Mixa. He was expressing his view in recent days on the family policy projects of Minister for the Family Ursula von der Leyen, which provide, among other things, for a tripling of the number of kindergartens by 2013. Mixa challenged these plans, calling them “damaging for children and families and exclusively aimed at actively promoting the professional life of working mothers with young children”. According to the bishop, “the efforts of the State to promote a modern policy for the family ought to be aimed instead at ensuring that ever more mothers can dedicate most, if not all, of their time to the bringing up of their children at home, at least until they are three years old, also by financial incentives”. Such a policy ought therefore to be aimed at “ensuring compatibility between bringing up children and professional activity outside the home, not contemporaneously, but successively”. Mixa condemned “the repeated attempts of the Minister for the Family to contest the necessary qualification of parents in bringing up children and to propagate a precocious and professional education of young children instead”. This is an attitude – he said – “that is reminiscent in an oppressive way of the ideology” of the former DDR (East Germany), “which – he recalled – had the highest concentration of kindergartens and at the same time the lowest birth rate in Europe”. “A sense of guilt in induced in women who bring up their children alone, since they are led to believe that a child at home is less challenged, and hence less able to develop, that would be the case if its education were to be entrusted to so-called professionals. But the real professionals of a child’s education are its parents, and in particular its mother”, said Mixa. The bishop also described as a “scandal of social policy” the fact that the bill being contemplated by the Ministry entails reducing funds in support of the family and allocating them instead to new kindergartens. As an alternative to current family policy, Mixa proposed state benefits to help all parents to bring up their own children, either by offsetting the costs of home helps or compensating for the loss of salary entailed by a mother’s decision to bring up her own child at home. The proposal is that of the Catholic Union of Families. The bishop lastly asked for a wider recognition of the periods dedicated to bringing up children in calculating pension rights, and greater state support for single parents and mothers in difficulty, who are forced to work even in the first years of life of their child.
