Focusing on Children? Recent Developments in Early Childcare in Germany

Starting point of our analysis is the assumption that for several years a ‚chidcentred social investment strategy’ […] is gaining more and more influence in modern welfare states. Under the concept of a ‚sustainable family policy’ this paradigm of ‚investing in children’ also becomes relevant in the German welfare state since 2002. In this context we are witnessing an increasing functional expansion of early childcare institutions (for children under the age of six) since some years. From our point of view there are at least two major developments within childcare policy that emerge from this new child-centred-paradigm. In accordance with the analyses of the German researcher Magdalena Joos […] we point out one of those two developments as a shift within the institutional childcare system ‚from care to care and education’. We understand the other – more or less parallel – development as a shift ‚from the child to the child and its family’. In this paper we will give a short overview on these two developments via looking at political documents and legal regulations. Based upon this we intend to answer the following two child-oriented questions: To what extent and in what manner are the needs of children considered in these recent developments of institutional early childcare in Germany? How are children and childhood socially constructed in this process? (DIPF/Orig.