Abstract
Social investment has gained increasing prominence in family policy reform. It has also been widely criticised from a feminist and social justice perspective. This article examines how the meaning of the family changes when it is seen as a site of investment. Using a discourse-analytical approach and focusing on agenda setting policy documents of Germany's ‘sustainable family policy’ this is explored in four dimensions: the extension and simultaneous narrowing of the meaning of family; the articulation of new gendered subjectivities; a redefinition of the boundaries between the family and the state; and new modes of differentiation between families according to their ability to ‘produce’ human capital. I argue that the traditional family loses its role as a normative reference point and is increasingly framed as a production site of human capital. Hence, more critical engagement with social and racialized inequalities, which are implied in these discourses, is necessary.
Introduction
Social investment has gained increasing prominence for welfare reform since the 1990s. Within both the academic and the policy discourse, social investment represents a paradigmatic change from more redistributive forms of welfare during the Keynesian era as well as from neoliberal welfare retrenchment (cf. Hemerijk, 2015; Jenson, 2012, for a critical discussion see Laruffa, 2018). In focussing on the supply side, social investment aims “to ‘prepare’ individuals, families and societies to respond to the new risks of a competitive knowledge economy” (Hemerijck, 2015: 242). These risks include precarious employment, insufficient social security coverage and family instability. Investment in human capital and the promotion of labour market participation are central features, addressing a wide range of goals, including combating unemployment, increasing fertility, economic growth and reducing the transfer of intergenerational poverty (Esping-Andersen, 1999; Hemerijck, 2015; Deeming and Smyth, 2015).
Family policy has emerged as a central field of social investment strategies in recent years. Work-life reconciliation measures, parental leave schemes, public childcare and early childhood education, in particular, have become key instruments in the development of human capital and the promotion of labour force participation (Fleckenstein and Seeleib-Kaiser, 2011). At the same time, this reorientation in the field of family policy has been widely criticised. Feminists have pointed out that the focus on labour market participation undervalues unpaid care work, leaves the familial division of labour untouched and hides inequalities between men and women (Saraceno, 2015). Lister (2006) and Jenson (2009) argued that the emphasis on human capital and utility for the labour market neglects the wellbeing and economic security of children as children and of women in their own right. The social investment approach is, hence, accused of instrumentalising family policy for economic and demographic goals (Daly, 2011). Further, with its neglect of redistributive policies and its strong focus on paid work as key to social security, social investment often seems to increase than reduce social and gender inequality (Bothfeld and Rouault, 2015).
While this literature highlights important shortcomings of the effects of social investment policies, it still envisages an understanding of the very ‘object’ of this policy, the family, which is undisputed or stable. If changes are noted at all, they are reduced to sociological dimensions (e.g., employment pattern, divorce rates; cf. Daly, 2011). In this article, however, I want to focus on the ideational and conceptual level to ask how the ‘family’ is constructed in the social investment discourse and how the meaning of ‘family’ is changing when it is seen as site of investment.
To do this, I am turning to the case of Germany's ‘sustainable family policy’ (Rürup and Gruescu, 2003; Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005) using a discourse analytical approach. Under the heading of ‘sustainable family policy’ the German government between 2002 and 2008 followed an explicit social investment agenda. The concept of sustainability, which is taken from the environmental discourse, remains underdetermined in the policy documents and refers vaguely to the goal of creating better economic and political conditions for a higher birth rate and increased investment in the education of children as society's future assets (Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005; cf. Ostner 2010). At the concrete policy level the ‘sustainable family policy’ aimed at the introduction of an income-dependent parental allowance and the expansion of childcare. Being confronted with high austerity pressure since the 1990s and with a Christian Democratic led Ministry of Family Affairs during the main reform phase, it represents an interesting case of strong implementation of social investment policies. Additionally, these reforms marked a paradigmatic shift from the legacy of the conservative welfare state with its orientation towards a strong male breadwinner model (Jüttner, Leitner and Rüling, 2011; Häusermann, 2018). It is therefore worth taking a closer look at the agenda setting documents of the ‘sustainable family policy’ reforms, notably the extensive corpus of policy texts, studies and expert reports which were commissioned or co-edited by the Ministry of Family Affairs and central stakeholders, such as employers and business organizations, or edited by the scientific advisory boards of the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs. In these documents, the programmatic reorientation of German family policy towards greater social investment was developed and legitimized.
Hence, I focus on the discursive and conceptual level. In targeting this material I deliberately do not concentrate on questions of feasibility or implementation, nor do I suggest, that the content of these papers and studies was directly translated into the reforms, bypassing the complex process of decision making. Rather, in focusing these documents, I want to remain on the ideational level to ask how the family, and, hence, one of the primary social institutions, is represented and conceived within the social investment discourse. In doing so, I follow approaches of interpretative policy research that look at how ideas inform and shape the specific understandings of the problems and challenges according to which action is taken (Münch, 2016).
The meaning of the family is changing fundamentally within the social investment discourse and Germany's ‘sustainable family policy’. The social investment paradigm brings with it a new understanding of what social and economic functions and what relationship to society and the economy the family has, which (new) gendered subjects, i.e., images of mothers, fathers and children, and which responsibilities are allocated to the family. The article explores the question of how the family is conceived when it is seen as a vehicle of social investment. It contributes to the critical and feminist literature on social investment policies (cf. St Croix et. al., 2020; Bothfeld and Rouault, 2015; Smith-Carrier and Lawlor, 2017) by indicating, how “objects become differently encoded, constructed and regulated” (Brodie, 1997: 235) in the context of welfare reforms. It is not only important to keep an eye on how the ‘object’ of family policy family is changing in these policies, but also how this allows us to reflect on what potential new inequalities and forms of exclusion these policies bring with them.
After introducing the methodological framework, I discuss the legacy of German family policy during the post war years to be able to contrast it with the new meaning of the family in current reforms. Then the policy-making processes of the reforms is outlined, and the main section focuses on the discourse analysis of the changing meaning of the family within the agenda setting documents of the ‘sustainable family policy’. This is analysed in four dimensions: an extension and a narrowing of the meaning of the family itself; the articulation of new gendered subjects; a redefinition of the character of family privacy; and, finally, the articulation of new differences among families according to their ability to ‘produce’ human capital. I conclude by summarizing my main arguments and highlighting their contribution to the critical debate on social investment policies.
Analysing the discourse of Germany's ‘sustainable family policy’
Since this article focuses on the changing meaning of family in the context of the ‘sustainable family policy’, the family is not presupposed as an objectively given matter to be regulated by the policy process. Rather the question is what knowledge about family is articulated in the process of policy making. Interpretative policy analysis (IPA) represents an approach that focuses on this central role of knowledge in the policy process (Münch, 2016; Fischer and Forester, 1993): policy reforms are not understood as a rational solution to objectively given problems. Rather, it is the contested definition of what is a relevant problem in the first place and what is the best solution for it, which is of interest here (Münch, 2016: 9ff.). The term ‘interpretation’ refers not only to the methodological approach, but also to the object of analysis and research itself. It is about (individual and collective) interpretive repertoires, discursive interpretations of problems, and assignments of responsibility. It is in this sense that the IPA insists that language, discourse, ideas and concepts must be examined in their relevance to the policy process and as the medium and object of these contestations. In contrast to hermeneutic approaches, which focus on the subjective interpretation of the actors involved in the policy process (cf. Yanow, 1996), the aim here is an understanding of discourses as social structures, as collectively binding knowledge practices and horizons of meaning (Wagenaar, 2011: 107ff.). In this sense, the focus is on ‘sustainable family policy’ as a hegemonic framework for the formulation of problems and solutions, within which a new and specific understanding of family can be scrutinized.
This article deals with the reforms of Germany's ‘sustainable family policy’ between 2002 and 2008. It focuses on the phase of agenda setting for these reforms in particular, on what problems were diagnosed in the field of family policy at the beginning of the reforms, what need for action was articulated and how these reforms were legitimized. The analysis covers a period starting after the federal election and change of government in 2002, which started the reforms, and ends with the adoption of the KiföG [Kinderförderungsgesetz or Child Promotion Act] in the Bundestag [federal parliament] in September 2008. With the ‘sustainable family policy’ new actors became involved in family policy in Germany. Traditional stakeholders, such as non-statutory welfare associations and organised parents’ associations, lost importance from 2002 on. In contrast, new and hitherto unusual actors in this policy field, such as industry and employers’ associations, like the Federation of German Industries (BDI) and the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA), as well as related research institutes, such as the German Economic Institute (IW), took on a central role in agenda setting for these reforms (Blum, 2012: 124ff.).
Hence, the corpus of material selected for the analysis consists, first, of two comprehensive scientific reports commissioned by the Ministry of Family Affairs in preparation for the legislative reforms, which are also the most important agenda setting texts (Rürup and Gruescu, 2003; Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005). 1 Second, two publications of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs on the reforms were included (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat, 2002; 2008). Third, the material includes studies and expert opinions from research institutes affiliated to the above-mentioned actors, all of which, however, were coedited by the Ministry of Family Affairs. 2
The method employed in this study is the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse developed by Keller (Keller, 2011). In order to analyse the “phenomenal structure” of the discourse of ‘sustainable family policy’, an analytical framework was developed which consists of ‘a priori categories’ (Kuckartz, 2016: 64) informed by my conceptual framing (the nature of the problem, the need for action, the solutions advocated, the representation of the family as the object to be addressed by family policy, the conception of its relation to society and politics and the attributions of responsibility, as articulated in the texts).
The coding process itself consisted, first, of a round of open coding of the ‘discourse fragments’, i.e., of the studies and reports, according to a content-analytical procedure (Kuckartz: 67ff.). In a second step, these findings were assigned to a priori categories in order to reconstruct the phenomenal structure of the discourse. For coding I used the analysis software Atlas.ti.
The (West) German welfare state and normative family models: The political and historical context
In the postwar decades the West German Federal Republic's social policy and taxation system was characterized by a normative orientation towards preserving the traditional family. West Germany was considered a prime example of a conservative welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and traditionally relied heavily on the family as the primary provider of social services. The principle of subsidiarity, which originated in the late nineteenth century as part of Catholic social thinking, shaped the German welfare state for decades and still has influence today. The family here represents the basic unit for welfare provision and is seen as needing protection from government intervention. The (welfare) state, hence, should limit itself to providing the best possible conditions for the family to perform these tasks and should only intervene when the family does not or cannot fulfil them (Fleckstenstein, 2011). At the same time German family policy (and also labour market and collective bargaining measures) were strongly oriented towards the male breadwinner model, i.e., a family model with a single earner, usually a male in full-time employment who generates the family income and an unpaid, mostly female homemaker who looks after the household, children and elderly relatives in need of care (Ostner, 2010).
The social insurance system focused on the wage earner, so that the social security benefits of female homemakers were mainly derived from their relationship to the male breadwinner. This normative orientation towards the traditional family with a gendered and hierarchical division of labour not only shaped social and family policies, but also materialized in the taxation system (joint taxation of married couples), in labour law and labour market policy (and its focus on standard and full-time employment) and collective bargaining and wage policy (family wages) (Jürgens, 2010: 574). Labour market participation of women was discouraged. The joint taxation for married couples privileged single earner families and made it rather ‘expensive’ for wives to take up employment. Childcare facilities were scarce and limited to over-three-year-olds, and until the 1990s often only covered half a working day, making it nearly impossible for mothers to go to work. In contrast, in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, DDR) full-time employment of women was the norm, supported by comprehensive childcare. Although East German stakeholders were able to influence important equality policy reforms after unification in 1990 in other fields, family policy in unified Germany was clearly characterized by continuity with West German social policy (Lang, 2022). 3
To conclude, the male breadwinner model continued to be a central pillar of German family policy after reunification until the end of the 1990s. Despite smaller reforms from the 1980s on and the hesitant expansion of childcare in the 1990s, family policy promoted a gendered division of labour and left a substantive part of reproductive social services within the household. Accordingly, most of the literature describes only a modernized breadwinner model until the early 2000s (cf. Leitner, Ostner and Schratzenstaller, 2004). This was to change in the following years.
The policy-making processes of the ‘sustainable family policy’
The ‘sustainable family policy’ comprises two main policy reforms: The expansion of day care for small children with the federal Day Care Expansion Act (Tagesbetreuungsausbaugesetz, TAG) of 2005 and the Child Promotion Act (Kinderförderungsgesetz, KiföG) of 2008, as well as the implementation of an income-dependent parental benefit through the Federal Parental Allowance and Parental Leave Act (Bundeselterngeld- und Elternzeitgesetz, BEEG) in 2007.
The expansion of childcare was already envisaged in the parental leave regulation of 2001, which entitled leave-taking parents to take up part-time employment up to 30 h per week. The TAG was passed by the centre-left government in 2004 and came into force in 2005. It aimed at the creation of 230,000 childcare places by 2010. However, the law remained largely ineffective, and the expansion progressed only slowly as the question of financial responsibility was not clarified. In this early phase of ‘sustainable family policy’ reforms, the project received little support from the government and key political actors.
This changed with the introduction of the KiföG in 2008. After the Bundestag [federal parliamentary] elections of 2005, the end of the centre-left government and the start of a new grand coalition, the now Christian Democrat [CDU]-led Ministry of Family Affairs surprisingly took over the goal of childcare expansion from its social democratic predecessor. The childcare quota of 30 percent set by the European Union's Barcelona targets also increasingly became consensual within the government. 4 Financial surpluses of the federal government finally enabled the financing of childcare expansion (Blum, 2012: 165). The KiföG, which was passed and came into force in 2008, aimed for a quota of 35 percent of childcare places for under-threes by 2013. This led to a further increase in the expansion target by 500,000 places at a cost of another three billion euros (Mätzke, 2018: 3).
The second major reform within the framework of ‘sustainable family policy’ was the introduction of a parental benefit. The Swedish model, with income-dependent benefits and a relatively short period of entitlement, served as a role model. From 2004 onwards, plans for a parental benefit developed by the Social Democrats gained increasing support from new key policy actors – business organisations, industry and employers’ associations. After the 2005 federal elections the new Christian Democratic Minister of Family Affairs, Ursula von der Leyen, also took over the income-based parental benefit concept with a twelve-month duration and two conditional months reserved for the partner, although these ‘daddy months’ were highly contested among the Christian Democrats. The BEEG was passed in 2006 and came into force in the following year. In contrast to the former care allowance, the parental benefit provides an income-dependent wage replacement benefit for 12 to 14 months. Compared to the previous care allowance with a (means-tested) duration of up to 24 months the duration was, thus, shortened considerably. The initial wage replacement was 67 percent and was reduced to 65 percent in 2010. The transfer payment amounts to a maximum of €1800 and a minimum of €300 per month (Ostner, 2010: 230). The reform, therefore, resulted in severe financial losses for people with a low income and for the unemployed. While low-income earners used to receive the basic amount of €300 for up to 24 months, the new parental benefit now only entitled them to a similar flat rate for a maximum of 12 months. The parental benefit for those registered as unemployed is deducted in full from their social assistance benefit, so in effect they receive nothing.
It is undisputed that these reforms indicated a paradigm shift (cf. Fleckenstein, 2011; Ostner, 2010). But what does this mean for the understanding of the family articulated in these policies?
The changing meaning of the family in the context of social investment policies
Before tracing the changes in the meaning of the family and the ways in which new inequalities are inscribed into the programmatic framework of ‘sustainable family policy’, it is important to highlight two problems that are articulated in the material and to which the new ‘sustainable family policy’ paradigm is supposed to respond. First, the low birth rate, which was 1.29 children per woman at the beginning of the 2000s, is problematized. Falling birth rates, it is argued, not only result in a smaller population but also foster the “ageing of society” 5 (IW, 2004: 5). In addition to the unfavourable impact on the social security system, the impact on the labour force potential and the international economic competitiveness of Germany are highlighted, because “creativity decreases with age [and] one can assume a partly declining quality of human capital with increasing age, since older workers participate less often in further training measures than younger ones” (Rürup and Gruescu, 2003: 47). Family policy is, thus, explicitly understood as “growth policy” (IW 2004: 10). Migration is repeatedly ruled out as a solution, since it would have to take place on a massive scale (Rurup and Gruescu, 2003: 48).
The second problem that takes a central role in the material is the poor performance of German students in the first PISA study of 2000 [PISA is the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, comparing performance of education systems transnationally]. Once again, it is the “stock of human capital” (IW, 2006: 11) and the “productivity and innovative capacity of the economy” (ibid., 3) that seem to be at risk. Compared to the PISA study itself (Artelt et al., 2001), however, there is a remarkable discursive shift, as success at school is not linked back to the education system but is reframed as a problem of families. It is the “familial milieus” (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat, 2002: 10) and, thus, the context of family-based production of human capital that are blamed. Families become the ‘hinge’ for political action here. On the one hand, ‘educationally deprived’ families or families with migration biographies are highlighted, who allegedly cannot pass on the appropriate human capital to their children (cf. ibid.; IW, 2008). On the other hand, the low reproduction rate of academic households is given special attention (IW, 2004: 18). Both these problems are revisited below.
Both aspects – the low birth rate and inadequate human capital development in education – suggest a political situation in which ‘unfavourable’ demographic trends can, in turn, only be dealt with by demographic and social investment measures. In the discourse of ‘sustainable family policy’, the wage-dependent parental benefit is intended to encourage high-earning mothers to have children and make female human capital available to the labour market earlier by shortening the duration of parental leave. The expansion of day care, on the one hand, is conceived as a reconciliation measure to promote women's participation in the labour market. According to the expert reports, out-of-home day care should enable the production of human capital in a professional educational setting in those cases where certain families are not able to provide for it (cf. Rurup and Gruescu, 2003: 64–66). I will discuss these rationalities in more detail in the four dimensions below.
What kind of family? From breadwinner model to reproductive unit
In the context of the ‘sustainable family policy’ paradigm, both an extension and a narrowing of the meaning of the family can be observed. Firstly, there is an extension since the rigid model of the traditional nuclear family is losing significance as a normative point of reference. Referring to socio-structural changes, it is repeatedly emphasized that the male breadwinner model no longer corresponds to the lived experience of most people (Rürup and Gruescu, 2003: 62–64; Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 47). The extension of the meaning of the family is also reflected in the fact that marriage has completely lost the significance it had in earlier family policy discourses. Marital status, if it is mentioned at all, is merely a factor correlating with high fertility (Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 20–22).
With the focus on birth rates and human capital production the legal status as well as the gender composition of couples become less important. Hence LGBT and lone parents are entitled to parental benefit, without their being explicitly addressed in the reports, though. At the same time, this points to the other side of this transformation: the strong focus on the family as a reproductive unit. The reports not only focus exclusively on the two-generation family as the “community of parent(s) and the child” (Rürup and Gruescu, 2003: 6; IW, 2008: 4). It is also seen, first and foremost, as a ‘site’ of physical reproduction and human capital production, rather than a cross-generational care context or in its role in social provisioning for its members. This is all the more astonishing given that caring for the elderly is de facto part of everyday family life in Germany. The majority of the 2.9 million people in need of care in Germany in 2015 were cared for at home and by relatives, and thus mostly by women (Leitner, 2019). 6 Instead, the focus is solely on the central role of the family in “maintaining the population in quantitative terms” and in the transmission of “values and norms of our society [and the] upbringing and education of children, especially in their early (childhood) years” (IW, 2006: 8). It is, therefore, the heterosexual and reproductive couple with its “desire to have children” (Rürup and Gruescu, 2003: 19; Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 12) who are the fulcrum of this policy. In the context of the repeated problematization of the low birth rate of higher-earning and well-educated couples, this shows a clear class and racial bias. The paradigms of compatibility and female career orientation not only imply a specific identity. Measures such as the subsidization of fertility treatment from 2012, which is based on these paradigms, also presuppose certain financial possibilities. In contrast, the desire of low-income or migrant couples to have children is not a subject of the documents (cf. Schultz 2015: 85–86).
From housewife to human capital provider: Gendered subjectivity
The second dimension in the changing meaning of family focuses on the question of which subjects are produced in the discourse of ‘sustainable family policy’. Female subjectivity particularly is undergoing far-reaching changes. Like the dismissal of the male breadwinner model, the programmatic rejection of the housewife is justified with reference to changed preferences and functional considerations in relation to the policy goal to increase the birth rate. According to the studies, female biographies have changed in recent decades. It is argued that the allocation of “private care” duties (Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 8) to women no longer fills their needs. By contrast, an increasing number of women are employed (or want to be) (ibid.: 19), but, at the same time, want to combine their employment with having a family (Ehlert, 2008: 33; cf. Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 36). Demographic arguments are also referred to by the authors, so the long assumed positive effect of women's interruption of employment on the birth rate is rejected. Instead, the correlation between a higher employment rate and a rising birth rate is repeatedly emphasized (cf. Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 39). Hence, in the ‘sustainable family policy’ women and mothers are conceptualized primarily as engaged in waged employment. The rejection of the sole focus on the housewife and the emphasis on employment as a component of female biographies, thus, represent a clear break with previous normative orientations of German family policy.
Male subjectivity, on the other hand, receives much less attention. It is striking that it is not explicitly addressed and reflected upon as ‘reproductive subjectivity’ in the same way. The role of men is not addressed at all in those passages that deal with the reasons for Germany's low birth rate, although it is highlighted independently in various documents that more men than women are childless (cf. Rürup and Gruescu, 2003: 16; Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 16).
Similarly, questions of reconciliation are addressed almost exclusively with reference to women and mothers. The implied unequal division of labour between parents is, therefore, not only not problematized but simply accepted as an empirical fact (Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 16). At the same time, this functions as a ‘hinge’ within the rationalities of ‘sustainable family policy’: In the material studied, it is exclusively female subjectivity that is addressed regarding fertility and the socialization of the child. It is the woman who decides whether to have a child under certain circumstances and who has that close relationship to the child necessary for familial human capital production (Rürup and Gruescu, 2003: 49–50).
This points to a final interesting point here. Female subjectivity in the ‘sustainable family policy’ not only includes biographies beyond the housewife. It also takes on a completely different role in the upbringing of children. Instead of the normative reference to the women as housewife, it is the human capital of employed mothers which is central for social investment strategies. Women and mothers remain reproductive agents. However, it is no longer their seemingly gendered dispositions that legitimizes them being addressed as housewives. Rather, in the context of ‘sustainable family policy,’ it is especially the highly educated mother's qualifications and level of education that are gaining in importance for the desired reproduction of human capital (cf. IW, 2008: 56–57; Bertram, Rösler and Ehlert, 2005: 9).
The family as a production site for human capital
Thirdly, in the discourse of ‘sustainable family policy’ the family becomes an educational institution, in the sense that it becomes a ‘site’ for the production of human capital. But not all families meet the high standards associated with it. It is repeatedly pointed out in the documents analysed that “the basic skills and readiness for school and lifelong educational processes of the upcoming generation are created in families. The family must therefore be recognized as the fundamental educational institution for children and young people” (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat, 2002: 9; IW, 2004: 22), while educational deficits with consequences for society originate in insufficient stimulation in the family (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat, 2002: 26–27). The family is conceived here as “the original and accompanying place of human capital formation” (ibid.: 9; IW, 2004: 22). Here, educational policy goals are rearticulated as family policy goals and new responsibilities and demands are, thus, placed on the family.
A closer look shows that this implicitly refers to an educated middle-class family ideal that is materially and culturally very presuppositional (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat 2002: 17–18). The private family relations described here are characterised by the fact that they are very time-intensive, aspirational and disciplined. Parents take on a highly reflective role and are aware of their pedagogic role, which in turn presupposes a high (formal) level of education.
With implicit reference to this family model, the new parental benefit (and parental leave) is then explicitly presented as a social contribution to human capital formation. The leave for the purpose of childcare “is as important as further training for a career, because it is a leave from work to support the development of human capital in a knowledge society” (Ehlert, 2008: 18). The shorter duration of the parental benefit (compared to the previous regulation) – which, at first glance, appears to be at odds with this goal – also fits into this rationality, because parents are required to return quickly to work in order not to reduce their human capital too much (DIW, 2005: 15; Rürup and Gruescu, 2003: 52ff.).
The reinterpretation of educational policy goals as family policy goals also has the implication that the low educational success of certain children no longer appears to be the result of social selectivity in the education system or the parents’ lack of material or time resources but is a consequence of their lack of human capital. Parents appear as the most important variable in the production and transmission of human capital in both a positive and negative sense. Moreover, they do so as individual carriers of human capital and completely detached from social relations. In the documents, human capital is thus conceptualized as inherited. Consequently, the process of the reproduction of human capital is not tied to the education system, but is conceived, on the one hand, via the reproduction of well-educated and well-earning persons. On the other hand, the expansion of day care is supposed to take over the production of human capital from families who seem unable to fulfil this task due to their social or ethnic positioning.
‘Hazardous’ families: The qualitative differentiation of families
Fourthly, the ‘sustainable family policy’ paradigm articulates new differences among families and addresses them differently. While the financial disadvantages for economically deprived parents that come with the new regulations are obvious at first sight, the specific way families are differentiated, are significant. Two modes of differentiation stand out especially regarding the qualitative goal of increasing human capital production: a specific ‘migration background’ and so-called ‘educational deprivation’.
Firstly, families are identified as deficient with reference to a specific migration backgrounds. The problems articulated here are primarily a lack of German language skills and (assumed) ‘cultural dispositions’ that are detrimental to the school attendance of children. Parents who have grown up in other cultural traditions may have ideas about school that differ from the ideas of this country. In some cases, they fear that their children will be alienated from their culture, with its values and customs, in this school system. Such assessments by parents put a strain on the open-mindedness of children and young people and the success of their learning. (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat, 2002: 22)
Secondly, socioeconomically disadvantaged families are given special attention. The studies and expert reports focus here on the lack of educational orientation. While earlier publications still argue a correlation between parents’ income and children's educational success (ibid., 30–31), this is explicitly denied in later texts. A publication by the German Economic Institute, for example, states that “parental income alone has no statistically significant effect on children's educational success; it is primarily the parents’ level of education that exerts a significant influence” (IW, 2006: 12). The lack of educational orientation in these milieus also manifested itself in “problems […] with parents” who “cannot or do not want to convey a positive image of school” (ibid., 21). Thus, it is less the lack of financial possibilities of families to pay, for example, for private tuition, but rather “the attitudes and values in the family [, which] have a great significance for the educational success of the children” (IW, 2008: 57). Hence, parents’ lack of financial resources is reinterpreted as individual normative orientations. Families here oversee providing “domestic inputs” (ibid., 43), such as a computer or access to books. If these “inputs” are not available, it is not attributed to a lack of financial possibilities. Instead, the acquisition of such things is seen as a ‘profitable investment’ which not all parents want to make.
This is what Schultz describes as the “central procedure of demographic knowledge production” (Schultz, 2015: 9). It abstracts from the social conditions in which families are positioned, objectifies the effects of social inequality and conceives of them as ‘qualities’ of certain segments of the population. Hence, the production of human capital is conceived as a genealogical process as described above; it is conceptualized as inherited. Consequently, the question of the (re-)production of human capital is not addressed as a matter of the education system but is made governable by influencing the quantity of different parts of the population and the physical reproduction of well-educated women in particular.
It is, thus, the “high level of childlessness among female academics” that threatens to “further exacerbate the problems of education policy and lead to bottlenecks among the next generation of skilled workers and managers” (IW, 2004: 18). The problem, therefore, is not the unequal distribution of resources but the fact that families with unequal human capital pass it on unequally to their children (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat, 2002: 32). The expert reports conclude: A better developed day care would give children from educationally deprived parents early access to knowledge. In addition, a family policy that makes it easier for women with an academic education to decide in favour of their own motherhood would also help to ensure that children from educationally disadvantaged families have better educational opportunities. After all, good students have quite a positive influence on less good classmates. (IW, 2004: 19)
Conclusion
The concrete impact of the reforms of the ‘sustainable family policy’ is modest, measured against the goals set for themselves. The childcare rate of 35 percent, which was targeted for 2013, has not been achieved to date in the West German states (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2022). Likewise, due to lack of financial resources or commitment, the targets for the expansion of day care have not been met and current studies assume that there will be almost 400,000 missing places by 2023 (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2022). The reforms also did not have the desired effect in terms of increasing the fertility rate, which rose from 1.34 in 2005 to only 1.58 in 2021. Nevertheless, the programmatic course was set with ‘sustainable family policy’ up to the present, even if the discourse has lost some of its alarmism since the mid-2000s and has entered a “post-catastrophic” phase (Schultz, 2015: 3). Accordingly, the main family policy reforms since the 2000s remain committed to these goals. In addition to some flexibilization regarding the parental allowance, there has been a legal entitlement to day care for under-threes since 2013 to further push the expansion target. With the KiTa Quality and Participation Improvement Act of 2018, the federal government is funding the expansion of day care in the states with a further 5.5 billion euros. The new government coalition of 2021 is planning further investments in the expansion of day care places.
This paradigm of ‘sustainable family policy’ and the reorientation towards social investment policies leads to a fundamental change in the understanding of the family. German family policy is moving away from the strong normative orientation of the male breadwinner model and the traditional family with a gendered division of labour. Family no longer refers to a normative model but is conceptualized more as an instrument (to be optimised) for the production of a resource that is indispensable for modern knowledge societies: human capital. The focus here is on the reproductive potential and the transmission of human capital within the family. The family in social investment discourse such as the ‘sustainable family policy’ is, therefore, seen as productive and hazardous – depending on the familial milieus.
I have sought to show that the changing meaning of the ‘object’ of German family policy also enables us to have a closer look on what potential new inequalities and forms of exclusion these policies bring with them. The strong focus on the family as a reproductive unit and its reframing as an educational institution for the transfer of human capital clearly targets and privileges middle class milieus. At the same time, it depoliticises and individualizes social inequality since it reframes ‘lacking human capital’ as inherited. The central role of well earning and highly educated mothers in the raising of children not only reproduces the gendered division of labor but also actively builds on it. Finally, families are identified and addressed differently according to their ‘migration background’ and ‘educational deprivation’ and, hence, their seeming ability to ‘produce’ and pass on human capital – some of them even being conceived as a risky environment for the development of children's human capital.
There is a need for more critical engagement with demographic aspects of the social investment paradigm. The aim of social investment policies to increase fertility and foster the production of human capital not only often hides and reproduces gendered inequalities (cf. Lister, 2006; Jenson, 2009). It also needs a broader discussion of which social and racialized inequalities might be implied in these policies.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.