CDU on families

The CDU wants to do away with parental fees for daycare altogether, after, by its own account, already initiating their halving by 2022. Quality and reliability of care, especially at the start and end of the day, are also to be priorities.

Parents pay money for daycare today. The CDU wants daycare to cost nothing. Care should also be good and reliable. That includes early mornings and late afternoons.

The platform argues that childcare has to be affordable. It says the CDU-led state government has already cut fees in half by 2022, easing the burden on families. The party sees care at the edges of the day as the test of whether family and work can really be combined.

The CDU wants to reduce group sizes in nurseries and kindergartens and back this up with substitution rules and a reserve pool of educators. Together with municipalities and providers, a long-term strategy for training and recruiting staff is to be drawn up.

Daycare groups should have fewer children. There should be a reserve of educators for when someone is absent. Other experts should also help in daycare. Every daycare center should have one French-speaking staff member.

Educators are to be supported as needed by child psychologists, social workers, youth welfare staff and other professionals. Flexible digital training is to be added. Every daycare center is to get a French-speaking staff member in order to implement the state's France Strategy and teach language skills early. The planned strategy of state, municipalities and providers is meant to secure enough training places, retain existing staff and make the profession more attractive to newcomers.

The CDU wants to extend the partnership months in Elterngeld (parental allowance) and give preference to companies that offer flexible hours and remote work. An expanded right to return to full-time work is meant to ease re-entry and significantly raise women's employment rate in Saarland.

Parents should be able to combine family and work more easily. The CDU wants couples to get parental allowance together for longer. Companies with flexible hours and remote work should get advantages. People working part-time should be able to return to full-time more easily.

Companies offering flextime, family-friendly hours, working-time accounts that allow negative hours, and remote work are to be favored. The CDU rejects the practice of accumulated time credits expiring on set dates. Advisory services and funding programs for remote work are to be created for companies and employees to preserve what was learned in the pandemic. According to the platform, women's employment in Saarland is below average; the state program "Frauen in Arbeit" (women in work) is to be reviewed for effectiveness and adjusted if needed.

The CDU wants to build a competence center for child protection in health care and offer child protection clinics as widely as possible. Routine child check-ups are to become more binding beyond the age of six as well.

Children should be better protected from violence and neglect. The CDU wants to build an expert center for child protection. There should be special clinics for children everywhere. Health check-ups should be more of a duty for older children too.

All health professions in regular contact with children are to be trained to recognize signs of violence. Child protection clinics are to examine suspected cases in a child-friendly way, on an outpatient and inpatient basis, and be reachable close to home. Saarland's law protecting children from neglect, abuse and mistreatment is to be amended. Doctors are to be allowed to exchange information with each other, for example when families switch practices. The CDU also wants to expand educational prevention programs outside of school.

The CDU wants to review and simplify all subsidy programs for families so that more families can buy a home. Funding for family vacations for low-income households is to be increased, and networked services for families are to grow.

Families should be able to buy their own home more easily. The CDU wants to make the support for this simpler. A website should show all the programs. Families with little money should get more help for vacations.

According to the platform, not all available funds are currently being claimed, so the programs are to be checked for effectiveness. A digital platform is to provide information, connect applicants with building authorities and developers, and allow applications to be completed online from start to finish. The family recreation program is to be developed further and given more money. Daycare centers, childminders and schools are to cooperate more closely with other family-related institutions. The family app and the family service and competence office are to expand what they offer.

The CDU wants to raise funding for youth work, vacation camps and out-of-school programs over the long term and make it permanent. The number of funded positions for youth education officers is also to keep rising.

The CDU wants to give more money to youth work. The money should keep coming over time. There should be low-cost vacation camps for children and teens. Clubs should get more paid experts for youth education.

Funding is to go to out-of-school youth education, recreation for children and young people, affordable vacation and weekend camps, and youth exchanges. The CDU wants this to secure the programs of associations, groups and other providers in the long run while using existing structures. According to the platform, the number of funded youth education officer positions rose from seven in 2017 to eleven. It is to grow further.

The CDU advocates a family working time model in which saved-up working time can be used for family or caregiving without real financial loss. Pilot projects are also meant to make it easier for people needing care to live with the families who look after them.

Parents and family caregivers should have more time for family. They should be able to use saved-up working time for this. They should lose hardly any money. The CDU also wants to fund new kinds of help for care at home.

Family working time is to build on existing Zeitwertkonten, accounts on which employees save up working time, and make them easier to use. For home care, the CDU calls for flexible support services. As an example of pilot projects, the platform mentions facilities for joint vacations of people needing care and their families. When care places are expanded, the federal and state governments are to pay subsidies together in order to avoid steep increases in long-term care insurance contributions.