What happens when you promise child care for every kid?

Life looked quite different for Sophie Charlotte Rieger before she gave birth to her son during the pandemic. Having worked the past decade as a film critic in Berlin, she regularly traveled around Germany to judge at festivals, on top of leading workshops, writing articles, and managing the online magazine she founded dedicated to feminist perspectives in cinema.
When Rieger became pregnant in 2020, her then-partner promised he’d take care of the house and be the primary caregiver of their child so she could keep up the career she’d spent years building.
It didn’t work out that way. She and her partner split and he no longer lives nearby. Twice a week her mom helps care for her son, but at 72, the grandmother can’t manage too much.
One thing that eases the situation a bit for Rieger is her son’s kita, or day care, which is part of a universal child care system in Germany. Beginning in 2013, lawmakers established that every child over the age of 1 is legally entitled to a kita spot, a policy rooted in a broader European-wide push to boost women’s participation in the workforce.
Quality and costs vary across Germany’s 16 states, but in 2018, Berlin became the first to make kita basically free. It’s the kind of support that many American families only dream of, and it pairs tightly with Germany’s 14 months of paid parental leave.
Germany has the third largest economy in the world and both Germany and the US have mixed capitalist systems, in which private businesses play a central role. These similarities have led some to argue that Germany’s universal child care system could offer a blueprint for supporting American mothers, a tangible example of what real investment in working women could look like. As US politicians continue to campaign on the burdensome costs of child care, many policy advocates remain hopeful that a kita-like system could be imported from abroad.
Rieger’s struggle, though, underscores the limits of the policy and the broader contradictions that make motherhood in Germany challenging, even with ostensibly affordable day care.
The kita system as it stands today represents both a lifeline and a real restraint. Despite its existence, Rieger, now 41, has found it too difficult to keep up with her writing and public speaking. She works periodically proofreading titles, synopses, and credits for a public television program, a role she describes as “way below my skill qualifications.”
On paper, Germany’s child care offerings seem ideal for helping women balance work and parenting. In practice, this promise of universal child care is more complicated — partly due to factors unique to Germany and partly due to other reasons that would likely pose challenges for adoption in the US and countries all over.
Understanding how policies like Germany’s kita system function in the real world can shed light on what it will take for modern societies to truly support working mothers, even if child care is ultimately just one piece of what’s needed for women to professionally thrive.
Given their similar financial systems, and that Germany was headed by a woman from 2005 to 2021, the country’s more socially conservative attitude toward working mothers can come as a surprise to Americans.
Yet most Germans believe that mothers with young children should not work full time, and because women do mostly stay home with their infants, children under 1 in day care are rare.
The societal message about where a German woman’s priorities should lie is not subtle: Rabenmütter — or “raven mother”— is a well-known insult. Rooted in a myth suggesting that ravens were negligent or cruel because their babies typically left their nests at a young age, rabenmütter is a term used to guilt German mothers who emphasize their careers.
Not only do German moms get called back less often for job interviews than childless women — a hiring trend also documented in the US and around the world — but mothers who take only the mandatory two months of German parental leave are also far less likely to be called back compared with moms who stay home for a full year after the birth of their child. (There is no difference in callbacks for German men who take short or long leaves.)
Many of these beliefs can be traced to Germany’s past, where the western (and far more densely populated) parts of the country embraced a male-breadwinner model, with strong cultural ideas that wives should stay home with children while their husbands worked. Public elementary schools were structured to be half-day in length, with the assumption that children would come home for lunch and mothers could provide care in the afternoon.
It wasn’t even until 1977 that women in Western Germany became free to legally seek jobs without their husband’s permission. The country still has a tax structure that penalizes married couples if both individuals work full time.
(Those living in East Germany during the Cold War, by contrast, had more egalitarian attitudes on gender and employment, and virtually all women worked full time. Non-working housewives in the socialist German Democratic Republic were stigmatized, much like rabenmütter in the West.)
Today, a generation after the country’s 1990 reunification, Germany boasts a relatively high female labor participation rate. But only half of women work full time, and the country has an 18 percent gender pay gap, one of the widest in Europe. A 2015 European Parliament report described Germany’s overall track record in promoting gender equality as “mediocre” and noted that women’s increased employment has come primarily through them engaging in a few weekly hours of low-wage work.
In 2023, two-thirds of all mothers in Germany with at least one child under age 18 worked part-time, and about 15 percent worked in a special subsidized part-time category called “mini-jobs,” where German workers can earn a maximum of 538 euros per month.
The federal expansion of part-time work, beginning in 2001, was meant to promote employment flexibility, but labor experts say it has entrenched women in economically vulnerable roles. Allowing women the chance to earn a modest paycheck is simply not the same as supporting them professionally.
“Mini-jobs have been promoted as an attractive, and less bureaucratic way to work … but our research shows they’re harmful to mothers,” Matthias Collischon, an economist at the Nuremberg-based Institute for Employment Research, told me.
Driven by factors such as unfriendly tax policies, significant penalties for extended employment gaps after childbirth, gendered cultural expectations, and uneven access to child care, most partnered moms just do not ever make the leap back to full-time work.
“There was a public debate that part-time would be a bridge to full time, but this is not true,” Friederike Maier, the former director of the Berlin-based Harriet Taylor Mill Institute for Economic and Gender Studies, told me. “Part-time is not a bridge, it’s a threat.”
Verena Wirwohl, a mother of two boys, ages 11 and 8, found that kita really did make her life easier. She credits the child care system with helping her sustain her legal career after her divorce.
“When I decided to have kids, I was still in a marriage with a high-earning husband,” she told me. “I was pretty surprised to find I could actually work full time and still spend time with my kids after becoming a single mom. So I would say the system really helped me to help myself.”
These positive feelings were echoed by Eva Asturizaga, 37, who grew up in the US but felt anxious about raising a family there given the threat of gun violence and attacks on abortion rights. After meeting her German husband while working on a development project in Kyrgyzstan, she decided it was essentially a “no-brainer” to relocate to his country given the myriad family supports the German government provides to parents.
“I think I’m just really grateful for this whole system,” she told me, as we sat near her home in southwestern Berlin. “The benefits just outweigh the cost and I cannot imagine having to spend 50 percent of my salary on child care.”
But easy kita experiences are not the norm for most families, and most women cannot use kita and work full time, even if they want to. Despite it being established as an entitlement more than a decade ago, day care access is uneven, often unreliable, and demand still far outstrips supply, particularly in Western Germany. Hours and availability vary across the country, as do enrollment practices; in some cities parents receive placement help from public agencies, in others families scramble on their own, calling individual centers they find online in the hope of a vacancy.
And parents often fail. While the number of children under 3 cared for in a publicly funded setting has risen 20 percent since 2015, the shortage of kita spots also increased about 60 percent in the last five years.
According to federal data, there are only enough slots for a little over a third of children under 3, but demand currently hovers around 50 percent. The greatest shortage today — over 101,600 missing spots — exists in the most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Government officials project that more than 310,000 children under age 3 could need a kita spot by 2030, and tens of thousands of new workers will need to be hired. (Most kita staff today work part time.) While some families attempt to fill care gaps by hiring private nannies or using publicly funded childminders, high cost and a limited supply of available workers remain barriers for those options, too.
Rieger, like most moms in Germany, works part time, sending her kid to day care until 3:30 in the afternoon. By contrast, more than half of mothers in the US work full time.
“Without day care I couldn’t have worked at all, or rather, a lot less … I can’t even imagine how it would have worked,” Rieger said. “But day care does not enable you to do your work as before … so I think for a lot of people the decision is still, ‘Do I want to have a career or do I want to have children?’ because there’s a difference between working and having a career.”
Perhaps the biggest threat for women under this system of part-time work and unreliable child care is destitution when they reach retirement age. The country’s pension gender gap is one of the largest in the industrialized world, with German women receiving on average nearly a third less in retirement income than men. Women “completely underestimate” the cost to their pensions by not working more, said Anna Raute, a labor economist who researches German policies.
Some of this may be rooted in financial illiteracy, though Jacinta Nandi, a Berlin-based writer and single mom of two, thinks the problem also stems from a German caginess when it comes to talking about money. This leads not only to a lack of wage transparency but also to a culture where women don’t realize how vulnerable they are.
“It’s this really weird part of German women’s feminism where they’ll go on dates and proudly say like, ‘Yeah, I paid 50/50,’ but then their husband is rich, and they’re not rich, and their husband might run off with a 20-year-old and people just act like if you don’t talk about it, then it’s not true,” she told me.
In 2023, Germany’s divorce rate exceeded a third of all marriages, with the average couple having been married for almost 15 years. Over half of divorced couples had children under 18.
Yet many partnered women underrate the chance they’ll one day split with their spouse. “Even though everyone knows that every third, if not second, marriage will end in divorce, they still believe that it will not happen to me,” said Lena Hipp, a sociologist with the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. “We are very bad lay statisticians.”
I asked Rieger, the former film critic, how she thinks about pensions and getting older.
“I know I will be struggling for the rest of my life, I don’t think it’s going to get better, so I don’t want to fight for this because I need my energy for other things and it’s not worth it,” she said. At this point the chance of inheriting her mom’s Berlin flat is the only thing she’s counting on for some bit of security in old age. “I’m going to work my ass off and in the end, I’m going to be poor,” she added. “I try not to think about it, to be honest.”
Comprehensive day care is not the singular answer to all these problems, but it would certainly help working moms. Although that’s what kita promised, and has been expanding in Germany over the last two decades, progress has been slow. Increased investment is competing with other political goals, and the 16 German states have discretion over how much they wish to prioritize it.
“You can always be spending more money on roads or hospitals or whatever,” said Maier, the former Harriet Taylor Mill Institute director. “While the federal government can give states subsidies for child care … some are just not willing to implement this.”
As a result, some states have created far more spots than others, or have better teacher-to-child ratios, or offer longer hours.
Just like in the US, getting a spot can be something of a rat race, in which high-income families invest more time and resources into hunting for space and getting off long waitlists. Low-income and immigrant families are the least likely to enroll their kids in kita, despite researchers finding that children from those households are the most likely to benefit from attending.In 2016, Germany’s highest court ruled that parents had the right to sue their town over lost wages if there were no kita spots available. The lawsuit came as a result of three mothers who said they couldn’t return to work because their government failed to invest in care.
But turning to the courts is not an option most families ultimately embrace, partly because those most likely to sue are the same ones best equipped to navigate tricky enrollment processes, signing up for dozens of waitlists, and continually calling to check if a spot has opened up. In Berlin, 350 people have sued for kita spots and back wages since 2018, Carsten Weidner, head of the state’s Early Childhood Education and Child Daycare Unit, told me.
Other challenges to expanding kita access are entangled in the realities of federalism, where it becomes too easy for different branches of government to insist it’s someone else’s responsibility to make a policy happen.
As in the US, kita workers are paid far less than public school teachers, and there are rampant staff shortages, frequent facility closures, and high turnover. Elke Alsago, head of the German trade union division representing child care workers, told me their most recent survey showed that 88 percent of staff felt burnt out and empty after work, and most, even those working part-time, would like to reduce their hours.
Yet when I sat across the table from Berlin’s State Secretary for Youth and Family Falko Liecke in August, and asked him what his department’s plan was to hire more child care workers, he said the 2,700 day cares that his agency oversees are responsible for their own staffing needs. Legally, he argued, it is not up to the government to work on recruiting more child care workers, despite parents having a federal right to kita.
Venera Chakirova, founder and CEO of Jump Bilingual Kita, is a director of one of those Berlin day cares. When I asked her about Liecke’s position, she was not surprised. “This is exactly the catch-22,” she told me. “Government gives us regulations, but they say that it is not their responsibility to support implementation.” Some policy analysts have called for more unified federal policy, to move kita away from this patchwork state system.
Germany’s economic status quo is increasingly untenable, which may force changes for working moms like Rieger.
The country had one of Europe’s worst-performing economies last year, and though the skyrocketing energy prices that followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine have since declined, housing costs, services, and some food prices remain elevated, leaving Germany’s economy on shaky ground. Its rapidly aging population threatens to further strain the system.
To address these challenges, most economists say Germany will need to find ways to increase the hours women work, particularly to help finance the country’s costly retirement benefits, and fill Germany’s hundreds of thousands of open jobs.
There are certainly women who’d like to increase their working hours. One German Economic Institute survey found that 69 percent of mothers with children under 3 do not work at all, though only a quarter, roughly, wanted to stay home full time. Another 20 percent work less than 20 hours a week, primarily due to a lack of kita options. “What we see in surveys is that women on average want to work more, especially in West Germany,” said Gundula Zoch, a sociologist at the University of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony.
Increased child care access in Germany has already boosted female labor force participation, and reduced mothers’ gaps in employment. Zoch believes the evidence strongly supports further state investment in care. “The immediate return is beneficial for the moms, children, the families,” she told me, “but then there’s the long-term economic development for these women and the country.”
Though there remains cultural stigma against moms who cannot be with their children in the afternoon, experts I spoke with said that might be changing, as the rising cost of living adds pressure on families to earn more money. Communities throughout Germany are also facing pressure to expand after-school programs for elementary school students, to ease burdens on working parents.
Zoch recalled the US television show Desperate Housewives, where a couple renegotiated and reconsidered the mom’s longstanding gender expectations amid economic pressure. She cited it to suggest that rising costs in Germany could lead to something similar for them now.
Yet even if kita access expands due to economic pressures, things won’t really improve for mothers if German men don’t also step up to shoulder more of the domestic labor. The German government can promote more egalitarian parenting, just as it incentivized fathers to take at least two months of parental leave by giving families extended benefits if both parents take time off work. Research suggests that even short periods of fathers’ leave can have long-lasting effects on their involvement in child care and housework.
Hipp, the Berlin-based sociologist, agrees that increased financial stress on families could lead to a change of gender role expectations for mothers in Germany, as well as more pressure on government officials to improve the kita system.
“At the same time, you know, personally this is not my ideal,” Hipp told me. “The thought that capitalism is just squeezing out people more, that this would be the driving force behind changing gender role norms, I also find this really sad to be honest.”
For all its shortcomings, Germany’s kita system is still markedly better than what most Americans have access to, and embracing the provision of child care as a core responsibility is something politicians in the US are only just beginning to do.
Should the US progress in steps toward a universal child care system, policymakers should similarly expect to face federalism-related challenges, including uncertain adoption if left to states’ discretion. Staffing would likewise be a major obstacle in the US without a significant increase in wages to recruit and retain workers. Moreover, key questions like the role of faith-based child care and whether to subsidize stay-at-home parents will need to be resolved.
As for Rieger, she knows it will take a mixture of policy changes to make life easier for moms like her, but getting child care right is essential. If her kita is even open, she spends 90 minutes a day commuting for drop-off and pick-up.
“Day care has to have hours that correspond to actual hours of working parents, and there have to be enough spots to ensure you don’t have to travel 40 minutes just to bring your kid,” she said. “If you’re the person saying, ‘Oh I have to be home by four because day care closes at that time,’ it will always be difficult for you to have a job or to be respected.”
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.