Existential Threat to Many Families – Dispossessed by Bureaucracy and Ignorance: Caregiving Parents in the Citizen’s Income System

From Young Carer to Caregiving Mother: A Lifelong Pattern of Overload

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Daily Life in a “Permanent Lockdown”: Travel Restrictions, Appointment Stress, and Total Transparency

• Freedom to travel? Hardly. Melanie is allowed to leave the local area (“Nahbereich”—close enough to appear at the job center immediately if required) for only 21 days per year—and only with prior approval. She must report back the day after returning. Weekends and public holidays count in full. On one occasion, the job center effectively prevented her from visiting her mother’s grave on the tenth anniversary of her death simply by failing to process her application.
• Constant threat of sanctions. Appointments are scheduled at impossible times (8 a.m., school dismissal, etc.). There is no simple way to cancel, and no direct personal contact information is provided. Missing an appointment can result in cuts to one’s subsistence benefits.
• No privacy whatsoever. All bank statements must be submitted, with very limited ability to redact information. Recipients become “transparent citizens”—a collection of sensitive data concerning the entire household is held by government offices. As she describes it: “Like going to bed every night with the door wide open.”
  
  The system is designed around a childless single person who is available 24/7. Single parents and family caregivers do not fit into that mold—and are simply out of luck. Individual decisions depend heavily on arbitrariness and the “chemistry” between claimant and caseworker.
  
  

  The Planned “Reform”: An Attack on Mothers and Caregiving Families

  Particularly alarming are the upcoming changes (merging housing benefits with citizen’s income, eliminating advance child-support payments, and introducing a full-time work requirement from a child’s first birthday onward). Families with children requiring care will be hit especially hard: there will no longer be any realistic option for one parent to remain at home. Both parents must make themselves available to the labor market—or fall through the cracks. Care work continues to be ignored. Melanie warns that these changes are steering many families toward an existential crisis.
  
  

  Responsibility of the Established Parties

  This bureaucratic monster was not built by aliens. The basic structures of Hartz IV, citizen’s income, and the current “reforms” all bear the fingerprints of the CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens, and FDP across successive coalition governments. Instead of radically simplifying the system, creating incentives, recognizing caregiving work, and restricting access to the welfare state for non-contributors, policymakers have merely renamed programs, added more regulations, and poured billions into an ever-expanding apparatus of control. The result: hardworking, qualified Germans like Melanie are kept dependent, stripped of their dignity, and pushed toward poverty in old age.
  
  Melanie and tens of thousands of other caregiving parents are not supplicants. They perform work that keeps the welfare state functioning in the first place. The state repays them with humiliation and a system that systematically disadvantages them.
  
  It is high time for a genuine fresh start: a legal distinction between caregivers and those fully available for employment, real recognition of caregiving work, a massive reduction in bureaucracy, and honesty toward citizens. As long as the established parties continue on their current course, this country will keep producing more and more frustrated, burned-out, and effectively dispossessed Melanies.
  
  Author: AI-Translation - АИИ  | 
  
  

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