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Maintenance payments are to be reduced, while child benefits will continue to be fully offset – contrary to your bold promise to finally improve the situation for single mothers. Are you serious, Ms. Prien?
Dear Mrs. Prien,
Last summer, my colleague Kristina Maroldt and I traveled to Berlin to ask you about your plans for women . What you said sounded quite good, especially when it came to single mothers—85 percent of whom are women. I quote:
“It is very important to me to improve the situation for single parents because they have to perform an incredible feat. Therefore, we will only offset half of the child benefit against child support advances in the future. Otherwise, we will hold delinquent child support payers more accountable and, for example, sanction them by revoking their driver’s licenses (…). Not paying child support is not a trivial offense. It is (…) a huge outrage.”
Almost none of this is set to become reality. If their latest plans are implemented, single parents will not be better off. On the contrary, their lives will become even more difficult than they already are in times of exorbitant food prices and meager job opportunities.
Instead of child support until the child reaches adulthood, there will be nothing at all on their 16th birthday if they receive maintenance advance payments – that is, the money that the state advances when the other parent (in 90 percent of cases, fathers) does not pay.
I can already picture the official letter to the child: “Happy 16th birthday! How wonderful that you were born, because we need your labor and your pension contributions! Therefore, we are discontinuing child support payments with immediate effect! Our advice: Perhaps you should start providing for your own support and working?”
The really difficult thing is that the planned cuts come at a time when teenagers are turning into insatiable gluttons, and keeping up with their peers becomes incredibly expensive. As a mother, you can’t get away with hand-me-down jeans from your brother or sister anymore, and you certainly can’t feed the boys with a €2.49 frozen pizza. Free train travel was only available until age 14 anyway, and discounts at the swimming pool or zoo end at 16. But you already know all that; you have three children yourself.
Contrary to what you indicated, child benefit will continue to be fully offset against the advance maintenance payment, not just half. In practical terms, this means that a single mother receiving an advance maintenance payment will have to forgo €1,554 in child benefit per child per year, while the billionaire receives the full amount. Furthermore, the Federal Cabinet, of which you are a member, has decided to abolish the immediate child supplement of €25 per month for low-income families. This disproportionately affects single-parent families.
Your policies will bring even harder times for single mothers, the group of people who, as you yourself said, “have to perform an incredible feat.” I find this—to use your words again—outrageous. Because it is precisely on the shoulders of mothers receiving child support advances that everything falls, since the father is absent: the demanding daily routine and the costs, which steadily increase as the children grow older.
Instead of improving the situation for these women, as promised, you’re making their lives harder – and letting fathers get away with not paying child support. The state only recovers the money from around 17 percent of parents who fail to pay, while in Norway the rate is 90 percent. And I’ll believe that, as promised, those who evade child support will have their driver’s licenses revoked when I see it. This measure was already decided upon in 2013. To this day: nothing has happened.
With disappointed regards,
Susanne Arndt