Falling German Birthrate Dispels Baby Miracle Myth

[Aptrgangr]

Falling German Birthrate Dispels Baby Miracle Myth


John MacDougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Infants with their mothers at a child care center in Berlin. The German government is trying to reverse a decline in the birthrate.

By NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: September 23, 2007

BERLIN, Sept. 22 — In baby-starved Germany, the hip eastern Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg appears to be nothing short of a miracle. Strollers jam the sidewalks and block the narrow cafes. The playgrounds of the largely gentrified Helmholtzplatz in the northern part of the neighborhood crawl with infants and toddlers, ringing with their cries and the creak-squeak of swings.

Henrike Peresse, 33, at a park with her year-old son, Malo, says she feels comfortable in the child-friendly area and repeats what is conventional wisdom here. “It’s the neighborhood with the most children in Europe.” This bold but common statement is usually accompanied by speculation that there might be something in the water that promotes the area’s mythic fertility. Those who are not ready for children are even warned to steer clear.
Treasure hunts most often end in disappointment, and this one is no exception. The Prenzlauer Berg miracle is the reproductive equivalent of fool’s gold, what demographers are calling an example of false fecundity. “If you look at the different quarters of Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg has one of the lowest birthrates,” says Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, who has been trying to debunk the myth since late 2004 with mixed results.
Still, it is hard not to see the allure that some miraculous reversal of the rapid graying of its population would hold for Germany, and for other countries around the globe facing the same trend.

A United Nations report this year called this global aging “a process without parallel in the history of humanity” and predicted that people older than 60 would outnumber those under 15 for the first time in 2047.
The twin forces of rising life expectancy and falling birthrates have accelerated the process. This is apparent from the United States, where policy makers fret over the baby boom generation beginning to retire, to Japan, which has the highest share of people older than 60 in the world. As in Japan, more than a quarter of the population in Italy and Germany is over 60, and the phenomenon extends to Poland and Russia.
Although the German government has begun to address the issue, it was particularly slow out of the blocks in dealing with its low birthrate, and, since 2003, the contraction of its population, in that first year by just 5,000 people, but in 2006 by a 130,000. The German population stands at 82.4 million people.

That was, in part, because almost no debate can proceed unencumbered by the country’s Nazi past. Hitler’s government gave medals to mothers of large families, gold for those with eight or more children. Uneasiness over the parallels kept the subject of encouraging reproduction on the back burner in Germany for years, unlike in France where promoting childbearing has long been government policy.
This month Eva Herman, a prominent television personality and author, was fired by the network NDR for praising the Third Reich’s emphasis on family and in particular on childbearing. Though she simultaneously criticized the Nazi government over all as she made the provocative remarks, her employer’s response was as swift as the public outcry was loud. Yet the World War II era is of little significance to the policy decisions regarding Germany’s current shrinking population, which is an economic issue today rather than a military or nationalistic one.

“It has to do with our past, of course. All the political parties really didn’t want to touch this issue,” said Mr. Klingholz, the population scholar. “In any other country where the birthrate was that low, there would have been a political outcry.”
According to European Union statistics, the crude birthrate — defined as births per thousand inhabitants — has declined in Germany in each of the last nine years, from 9.9 in 1997 to 8.2 in 2006. Even after factoring in immigration, the German population is experiencing “exponential negative growth,” Mr. Klingholz says. The problem is not new — deaths have outnumbered live births in Germany since 1972 — but a muscular response by the government is.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and her minister for family affairs, Ursula von der Leyen, have made it a prominent issue. A program known as Elterngeld, or, literally translated, parent money, which began this year, replaces up to two-thirds of a new parent’s salary to a maximum of 1,800 euros a month, about $2,530, if he or she decides to stay home. It replaced a program that only helped lower-income families with at most 450 euros, about $630, a month.

The new program lasts for a year for one parent or 14 months if both mother and father share the time off. The government has allocated 4 billion euros, about $5.6 billion, a year for the program, which it reported fulfilled all expectations in the first half of the year, with applications rising to 140,000 people in the second quarter from 60,000 in the first.
The federal government will spend another 4 billion euros as part of a 12 billion euro program including city and state money to build day care centers in 2008 through 2013. Officials expect to add 500,000 slots to a total of 750,000, filling a dire need. “That would mean one day care spot for every third child under 3 years old. Today there is one for every 10 children,“ said Iris Bethge, a spokeswoman for the ministry.
Ms. Bethge said the government was also working with businesses on telecommuting and flexible scheduling. And beginning in January the federal government, with European Union support, will provide money to help businesses pay for their own kindergartens.

Thusnelda Tivig, a professor at the University of Rostock’s center for demographic change, said there had been a slight increase in births in the first half of 2007, roughly 600 more than in the first half of 2006. While that is not much, and is possibly attributable to an improved economic climate, it is the medium and long-term effect of government policies that matter most. “I’m absolutely convinced that it will have an impact, but not immediately,” Professor Tivig said.
Parents at Helmholtzplatz, whose incomes vary widely, expressed far greater support for the building of day care centers than for Elterngeld, in large part because of a perceived bias since the payoff is based on earnings. “They want the rich people to have children and not the poor,“ said Catherine Girke, 37, who has a daughter and three sons.

“It would be better if they focused on providing enough day care spots,” said Ms. Peresse, suggesting that all the money should go to building centers and then subsidizing the cost for parents. “That would be a real inducement to have children.”
Once a construction supervisor, Ms. Peresse has stopped working for what she plans to be just a few years while she rears her son and expects to find a new career when she goes back to work, something less consuming. Her husband is half French, and they lived in France when Malo was born. France does not have all the advantages, she said, although its aggressive incentives program for multichild families has bolstered its birthrate.

“I find Germany very child-friendly, much more than France,” Ms. Peresse said. It is easier in Germany for mothers who choose to stay at home with their children, and much easier in France for those who decide to return to work, she said.
Helmholtzplatz itself, a park tattooed with graffiti — some of which appears to have been commissioned as art and the rest spontaneous — provides a snapshot of the changing neighborhood around it. Prenzlauer Berg went from squatters behind often crumbling facades after the fall of the Berlin Wall to colorfully rehabbed yellow and blue buildings now considered a yuppie haven, with a Bohemian bent.
“There’s an insane number of children, but it makes it nice to live here,“ said Steffi Niemzok, who was sitting on a park bench eating ice cream with her 2-year-old son, a friend and his son on a bright September afternoon.

The baby miracle of Prenzlauer Berg seems indisputable in the rush of children on bicycles, playing basketball, or digging in a sandbox. This enclave with many artists and professionals, would be an appealing spot to find the hope of a nation, apparently more so than the immigrant-heavy Neukölln neighborhood that Mr. Klingholz says has the highest birthrate in the city.
Many children live in Prenzlauer Berg, even though the birthrate is below the average for the city, the country and the continent. But the number is really explained by the rush of young people who moved into the neighborhood over the past two decades and stayed put.

They aged from hipsters with rock bands to parents with careers. There are proportionately fewer children than elsewhere, but an overwhelming number of adults are of prime child-bearing age.
They, rather than their children, are the phenomenon.

Falling German Birthrate Dispels Baby Miracle Myth - New York Times

[Engelbrecht]

Originally Posted by Aptrgangr

That was, in part, because almost no debate can proceed unencumbered by the country’s Nazi past. Hitler’s government gave medals to mothers of large families, gold for those with eight or more children.

Well, in fact a gold medal was given for the seventh children.

Originally Posted by Aptrgangr

This month Eva Herman, a prominent television personality and author, was fired by the network NDR for praising the Third Reich’s emphasis on family and in particular on childbearing. Though she simultaneously criticized the Nazi government over all as she made the provocative remarks, her employer’s response was as swift as the public outcry was loud.

Fantastic. Free speach, anyone?

Originally Posted by Aptrgangr

Yet the World War II era is of little significance to the policy decisions regarding Germany’s current shrinking population, which is an economic issue today rather than a military or nationalistic one.

Yes and no. Todays economic issue is of course a result of the politics after WW2. But this egalitarianism that is the cause of the declining birthrates started long before WW2. But as we all know, the defenders of secular egalitarianism came out victorious from WW2.