Debate about daycare: gifts on Mother’s Day? Please don’t abolish it!

2023-05-11 08:50:00

Opinion Debate about daycare

Mother’s Day gifts? Please don’t abolish it!

Status: 11:55 a.m | Reading time: 4 minutes

“Kein Tag der Lorbeeren”: WELT author Charlotte Szász

Source: Archive Charlotte Szasz

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Should children still make Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts? A Catholic day care center has abolished the tradition – with the argument that it no longer corresponds to the reality of life. But for me as a mother and feminist, this day has meaning for that very reason.

Dhe Mother’s Day is upon us, and what better way to celebrate than with a proper debate. The CDU member of the Bundestag Tilman Kuban complained on Twitter about a Catholic daycare center that explained in a letter to parents that there would be no handicraft gifts from the children for their parents on Mother’s or Father’s Day this year. The day care center explains in its letter to parents, which Kuban makes public as a photo, that one has the feeling that “flowers for the mother and tools for the father” are no longer up to date.

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Admittedly, everything about Kuban’s communications is terrible. The address of the day care center, which has since apologized extensively for its letter to parents, is given, an internal communication is published and its specific approach is pilloried. The sensitive topic of questioning gender roles led to agitation against the facility in right-wing networks beyond Twitter.

But what about the actual problem of gift-making raised by the day-care center? For reasons of diversity, the handicrafts for the holidays are abolished, which it is anticipated that some people will no longer be able to identify with. The term “lived reality” can be read time and again in criticism on Twitter.

More than sexual reproduction

It seems obvious why you don’t start with Christmas. Unlike this holiday, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day allude to a specific identity that a parent has towards the child that is far more personal than the birth of Jesus. With the celebration of the holidays, it is specified and implicitly assumed that the parents can always identify with their role in sexual reproduction. It really doesn’t seem up to date anymore. All realities of life should be recognised, with the result that the constricting Mother’s and Father’s Day is no longer seen as bearable for the day care center.

But how difficult is it really to do justice to the changed realities that are being discussed here? Whereas you could simply make two gifts for two mothers or two fathers, it is of course more difficult in the case of orphans or half-orphans, children cared for by grandparents and relatives. A de-sexualization of parental identity, precisely for certain caregivers, is necessary. But not for others.

So it seems like a joyless decision to simply do without the tinkering altogether. On the website catholic.de can be read on the debate about the Catholic daycare center: “Reality is more important than the idea,” Pope Francis said ,The gospel of joy’ from, the central program of his pontificate.” But is that true? Is reality really more important than the idea?

Celebration of Care Work

For me as a mother, Mother’s Day is an opportunity to distance myself with my child from our “lived reality” in which we find ourselves every day. My child can learn from this day that I have a certain connection to him that I do not take for granted. To paraphrase the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir: No one is born a mother, one becomes one.

For me it is not a day of laurels, but the abstraction of my parental relationship to the child as a “mother”, which should make clear to my child the fact that I devote parts of my life to him. I’m not just a mother. Abolishing Mother’s and Father’s Days, rather than transforming them, is a way out that cleans up the debate about changing family relationships, but does not solve the problem.

From a feminist point of view, a parents’ day should therefore open up the possibility of celebrating care work with the children in a playful way and at the same time questioning it. So it’s up to the educators not to create gender-coded gifts, but to design gifts for parents with sensitivity to the changing society and their children. You don’t make ashtrays for your parents anymore.