Familienpolitik

Whenever I tell anyone in Brussels that I’m interested in family policy, they wave their hands at me and remind my that families are not one of the ”competencies” of the European Union.  Member nations would never let the EU tell them what to do in such private matters.

And yet there are situations where a more coordinated approach might be beneficial.  This summer The Economist depicted the consequences of a lack of unity in this vivid example:

She was French; he was English; they had just moved to London from Paris. When he found out about her affair, she begged for a reconciliation. He was more ruthless: the same afternoon, he filed for divorce in France, one of the stingiest jurisdictions in Europe for the non-earning spouse and where adultery affects the court’s ruling. Had she filed first in England her conduct would have been irrelevant, and she would have had a good chance of a large share of the marital assets, and even maintenance for life.

This is the sad side to EU integration, increased mobility and all those lovely study abroad programs.

Today the justice ministers from each of the EU member countries met informally in Prague.  As Deutsche Well reports, there was little consensus on the matter

The Czech Justice Minister Ji?í Pospíšil saw hope in the concept of “enhanced cooperation” where groups of member states can ask the Commission to apply laws to them that the rest of the bloc hasn’t agreed to yet.  But most other ministers, including EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot did not think it was the time for enhanced cooperation.  A measure to clear up where a couple should get divorced was shot down by Sweden in 2006, with the argument that Swedish citizens might be forced to accept a less favorable divorce than Swedish law provides.

That is ultimately the problem.  Across the EU there is a wide range of approaches to divorce, leading to the scene at the beginning of this post.  But there will be no harmonization of divorce law.  Remember, the EU isn’t responsible for those sorts of things!

Tags: Divorce

Last night, at the end of a long day at work, my German co-worker surveyed the room.  All of the men had gone home, but there were still three women left.  “Women are prone to self-exploitation,” she said.  This is likely a problem worldwide, but recent developments in Germany clearly support her theory.

Germany is progressive and modern in so many ways (Chancellor Angela Merkel is Forbes’ “most powerful woman” for the third year in a row), and yet there are some equality issues they just can’t get right.

Spiegel Online reports here that a new ruling awarding the female head of a human resources department than €20,000 in damages for workplace discrimination is the first of its kid.  And that despite the passing of the 2006 Equal Treatment Act, it doesn’t look like it will become commonplace anytime soon.

Two years after the AGG has been in effect, the surprising conclusion is: other women don’t even bother to try.

According to the article, only 36 plaintiffs have invoked the new law since it went into effect 30 months ago.  And most of them haven’t been women.

Yet the article also provides a couple of grievances.  German women earn 23 percent less than their male counterparts and make up only 5.5 percent of top management positions.

I’ve always been concerned that common cultural sentiments, such as calling working mothers “raven mothers” (ravens are supposed to be very bad mothers), will make it harder for Germans to open their minds to different ways of parenting and different ways of working.  Spiegel ends the article positively with one of the lawyers representing the successful plaintiff.

Braunschneider cites the psychological principle of anchoring, which holds that people will eventually accept something as a social reality if they have heard it often enough.

And yet, even with the equality law in place, the exploitation, both self and otherwise, continues.

Tags: family policy, Germany, job discrimination

I’ve been bad at keeping up this blog.  But now that I’m back in Europe, with an internship in Brussels, I have all sorts of family policy issues to blog about.  I promise!

Photo by Georgios Karamanis under Creative Commons license.

In this Slate article author Emily Bazelon asks a few questions about changes in American kindergartens that many upper-middle-class families don’t want to ask.  Is the increasingly academic nature of kindergarten good for my children?  Why are schools and states pushing up the cutoff date for kids starting kindergarten?  What’s the impact on the other kids in the class if I start my son or daughter in kindergarten at age six?

The answers are not good.

Individually speaking, no harm done, perhaps, though the presumed benefit is an open question. But collectively, delaying kindergarten is a bad idea—especially for poor kids, for whom it often means one more year of no school.

Based on research presented in a new paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Bazelon makes these worrisome points:

• Delaying some kids another year creates an age span in the classroom that disadvantages younger students, even if they are developing at the normal pace.
• Lifetime earnings are depressed for late starters because they also enter the workforce a year later than they would have.
• Delaying kindergarten means less public school for those kids who are risk for dropping out.  They turn 18 earlier in their educational career and are thus able to drop out after receiving less education

“All of this should make us leery of governmental policies that delay kindergarten,” writes Bazelon.  But when it comes to your own kid are you really going to worry about the effect on some general group of low-income kids somewhere in the country?  The authors of the study are now looking at whether there’s an advantage to late-starters at the other end.  Do 6-year-old kindergartners later have a better chance of getting into the top colleges?

Bazelon doesn’t mention it specifically, but my gut feeling is that accountability policies such as No Child Left Behind, which link school funding with student performance, may be driving schools to encourage parents to keep their kids home a year long in the hope that older children will do better on tests.  Based on Bazelon’s reporting, this might be short-sighted.

Tags: school

This weekend I finally finished a movie I started on a LAN flight from Madrid to Frankfurt almost a year ago. Daniel Burman’s Family Law (Derecho de familia) is a sweet look at an Argentinean law professor, his lawyer father and his young son. The film is mostly only related to this blog by its title but is worth adding to your Netflix list. Perhaps men are having more trouble figuring out what it means to be an engaged father and successful professional than we often think.

Tags: Argentina, fathers, film