'Mother,' 'Father' Changing to 'Parent One,' 'Parent Two' on Passport Applications

[Gammelpreusse]

Originally Posted by Skybird

But that is the problem, and it is not just a fincial one. The Elterngeld raised by van der Leyen saw no raise in births, but a further decline, and Gunnar Heihnsohn, professor erimitus, shows by his statistic research on demographics and immigration that there is a growing of the social lower class and a decline in the upper and academic class, for example I referenced him here. As von der Leyen has learned, couples do not get babies becasue the state pays them a bitmore money - at least in the upper class they still get babies becasue of love, and because they want babies - not necessarily the money.

Question is, why those families who could afford to have more children, don'T have them to maintain the size of that social group, not to mention to increase it. And why those not being able to afford it, have so many children.

So far agreed.

There is also an other trend, that you correctly pointed out, and that is that more and more kids get raised by just the mother (for the most) or the father. Obviously the parents got a baby unprepared I (no excuse for that, sorry), or at a stage of their relatioinship where they still could not be sure whether they would last with each other, or split again. To much bed-adventures going on too easily, and everybody jumps into the bed with everybody else too fast.

Also agreed.

But it is also both a cause and a consequence of the further erosion of the institution of an intact family.

Here we part in cause and effect. More next.

We do not need babies per se in Germany. We need more babies fro t he highly educated socail classes, and we need less babies from the less educated social classes. Only then there will be a future population that even can hjpope to have a slim chance to shoulder the tax burdens of the near futurte that are needed to maintain even basic, minimal sociual security. Having babies and more babies that will not contribute to the tax income once they have grown up, but that will cost the state becasue they will not make it in a job with solid payment because due to their social class they had no chance to raise to higher education (there is a strong link between social class and future job perspectives, and some other factors), will make things worth for all of us. So we do not need an undiscrimionatory increase in our population again to counter overaging, not by a baby-.boom and not by immigration. We need babies from the "right" social backgrounds. Every mother getting a baby while being young, maybe without job or in a low-payed job, and husband left her, costs us money, and easily more money than the baby will give back to the state once it has grown up, in taxes.

We need, more babies, period. It does not really matter where they come from.

A couple points to that.

First of all, the lower clases "always" had lots of children, even in the times before social securities and Kindergeld. Children always have been the safe keepers of a couple's future, so to say their life insurance. The more children, the more security later on. Actually, with all that financial security nowadays it would be logical for lower classes to get "less" children.

Second, we have a huge problem with class penetrability. It really does not matter so much where children come from, as long they do not get better education it won't achieve to much. I do not buy the argument that lower classes are inherently more stupid and thus less capable, that is 19th century thinking long disproved. I also personally met enough "lower" class folks with a high degree of intelligence but the inability to make any proper use of it because they never really learned how to move within German business and upper class society. And look at German society, where especially higher class parents try to get their children away from public schools and to private ones. And no wonder, given the sorry states of many schools and the lax attitudes of many teachers. We need all day schools where the children get away from their social environment and teachers taking their profession serious.

Third, I especially lay the blame at the higher classes, which have enough ressources to get children going and ensure their education. However, in this class children have become a status symbol like a dog. You have them, you show them around and you brag with their achievements. The few children available to this class are under 24/7 surveillance, have to fill their days with all kind of activities like music, riding, going abroad and so on, with hardly time for themselves. The result are artificial beings without social competence and a serious lack of character, tweaked solely for performance and no idea what the real world looks like. That these folks also lack a serious feeling for family does not wonder me much.

All these complains by higher class folks are a distractions for problems caused by themselves in most parts and their unwillingness to give up their status and influence in society. This is also reflected in the abandonment of the "Humboldtsche Bildungsideal" for the sake of economic performance in universities.

This is - beside the immense interest service of the state for its existing debts, and possibly in the near future the Euro collapse - the one thing that ruins Germany's finances more than anything else, and leading the nation to the brink of collapse.

There we agree again, but as I said, under completely different preconditions.

But this is worth a new thread, I think this goes too much off topic now.