Closed daycare centers, overwhelmed parents: between phone calls with the boss, children raging around the desk and lunch somehow cooked next to the video conference, the largely unused childcare tears on the nerves of many parents in the corona lockdown.
The extension of the childhood illness days from 10 to 20 decided at the federal level is a gesture that the government sees the problems - but hardly any more.
Something has suddenly disappeared that was so firmly a part of our everyday life and often made it possible in the first place: institutionalized childcare.
The idea of caring for and educating the youngest outside the family is not that old in history.
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Pedagogue Froebel: Kindergartens are allowed to call him papa
Photo: Archive Gerstenberg / ullstein Bild
It was around 180 years ago that the educationalist Friedrich Fröbel, a student of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, founded the world's first kindergarten in Bad Blankenburg, Thuringia, in 1837.
It arose from play groups that Froebel had organized for mothers and their children.
The term "garden" was no coincidence: children should be given space to grow and blossom, a "pedagogy from the child" instead of an authoritarian upbringing.
Froebel initially understood this to be a place where mothers could learn to strengthen their children's development through games.
This turned into the kindergarten as a care center outside the families.
In the middle of the 19th century, Froebel initiated an upheaval, the consequences of which seem obvious to us today.
To this day he is considered the father of kindergarten, his birthday on April 21 is even celebrated in Great Britain and the USA as "National Kindergarten Day".
But the history of childcare goes back further.
Knitting in the name of the Lord
As early as June 16, 1779, the housekeeper Louise Scheppler and her employer, the Protestant pastor Johann Friedrich Oberlin, opened a toddler school in the eastern French community of Waldersbach and soon had more to follow.
Oberlin called them "knitting schools", open four days a week.
In today's understanding it was less schools than day-care centers with “subjects” such as knitting (“for boys as for girls”), singing sacred songs, telling “edifying stories” and the basics of geography and natural history.
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Kindergarten of nuns in 1882 in Rouen (France): "Making the presence of God clear"
Photo: Culture Club / Getty Images
It was also about "making clear to them the presence of God, at any time and in any place" - by kneeling and praying together.
The little ones should grow up to be devout parishioners.
Scheppler and Oberlin wanted to show children early on "what displeases God": for example curses and lies, disrespect for parents, laziness and uncleanliness.
This school helps parents, according to Oberlin, to "get the children off the streets" and to put them "under good supervision", who get them used to work and prepare them for school - "than ever more a child is allowed to run around , the less it can be made to learn «.
Parents didn't have to pay for this early daycare, on the contrary: the children were paid for their knitting.
A Parisian fashion in Detmold
Another early form of childcare that emerged in the Netherlands at the end of the 18th century was less about work preparation: the "play schools" also taught small children knitting and spiritual songs, reading and spelling were also practiced - but always playfully.
Johann Grabner described enthusiastically in 1792 in »About the United Netherlands.
Letters "his observations on a trip:" The most excellent benefit of these institutions "is that" even the children of the meanest people are under constant supervision (...) and are not in danger of getting caught up in all kinds of debauchery. " often reflected in their further résumé.
What the Gotha legal scholar criticized, however: The fact that any "widows and other elderly women" supervised the children - here the authorities and clergy should better control that only "school women" of "educated mind and gentle character" are employed.
Princess Pauline zu Lippe-Detmold was also impressed by the daycare concepts of the European neighbors.
In 1802 she proposed "to transplant a Parisian fashion to Detmold": "Madame Buonaparte and several graceful and elegant ladies," as the princess described it, had created halls in Paris "with a truly feminine feeling of sisterhood" where the delicate little ones were poorer , for the time being, to be nourished, cared for, cared for with mothers employed in external work «.
Every morning the “happy mothers” would drop their children there and pick them up again in the evening “happy and grateful”.
The princess then called her first German daycare center in a somewhat romantic way "storage facility".
From storage to education
The relief of working mothers through organized "custody" of their children may have an emancipatory effect from today's point of view, but was born out of bitter hardship at the time: due to strong population growth and mass poverty in the 19th century, more and more German mothers saw themselves forced to pay the meager income of traditionally men To supplement the head of the family by doing a job themselves.
At the same time, with the advancing industrialization, the traditional extended family, which had previously also shaped childcare, fell apart.
Many children of working mothers were left to their own devices and practically grew up on the streets.
For this reason, day-care centers were seen more as emergency aid for hardship cases than as a comprehensive offer for the population.
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"Like the seed, so the fruit": Childcare facility of a weaving mill in Linden near Hanover (1884)
Photo: Image agency for art, culture and history
Little by little, the children's institutions developed into an educational tool.
With his kindergartens from 1837 onwards, Friedrich Fröbel wanted to appeal to the senses of toddlers and make their play instinct useful for learning processes at an early stage.
He saw early childhood as a phase of life that is of outstanding importance for later lifelong learning - even more important than later school education.
The kindergarten boom
Fröbel's tools for early childhood education differed significantly from those in schools: In order to initiate learning as playfully and sensually as possible, children were given the so-called »Fröbel's toys« - simple geometric bodies that are replaced by smaller objects as they grow up.
For him, playing was a central activity in order to test the human imagination and physical abilities.
Froebel's songs and finger games should be used by one year olds and sharpen their senses.
The kindergarten became a successful model.
In the 19th century there was a boom in childcare facilities based on Froebel's model, although the states of Prussia and Bavaria banned kindergartens in 1851 because they saw socialist breeding grounds in them.
Later the National Socialists tried to turn Froebel's legacy into an instrument of indoctrination of the Nazi regime, to raise boys to soldiers and girls to mothers.
Nevertheless, the educational reform approach of the childcare center survived as a space for development.
"Come on, let's live our children!" Was the title page of Froebel's 1844 book "Mutter- und Koselieder".
It was the central motto of his pedagogy: Fröbel was not about living for the children, but about creating a conscious, respectful coexistence of adults and children - big and small should share their lives with each other.
Today around 3.7 million children are cared for in the 57,600 German day-care centers.
If they are looked after.
Living together, sharing life has undoubtedly become closer for families in recent months under the pressure of the corona pandemic and daycare closings.
But what about mindfulness between zoom video conferences and the urge to play, overtime at the kitchen table, existential fears and the child's need for attention - that is a completely different question.
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