Can I Borrow Your Grandkids?

Lonely German pensioners are hiring themselves out to stressed-out single mothers to take their children off their hands for a few hours a week.

The “Rent-a-Granny” scheme illustrates Germany’s demographic dilemma: Too few children are being born to finance the generous pensions of the postwar baby boomers.

“I don’t have any grandchildren myself and it is good to have contact with the next generation,” said a 65-year-old who gave her first name as Norgard, showing off photographs of her “borrowed grandchildren” to pensioners at a coffee morning.

“My grandchildren don’t need me anymore and after my mother died I had time to do something,” chipped in Waltraut Rosenberg, 73, who has helped a single mother keep her job in a bank by looking after her 10-year-old son after school.

The rapid graying of the German population is suddenly looming large in many key political debates, from retirement to immigration, from health care to unemployment.

Social worker Roswita Winterstein, who runs the Berlin “Grandparents Service” project that brings elderly people and single parents together, says Germany does not do enough to encourage women to have children.

“We are really unfriendly to children. I wouldn’t want to be a young mother today - they are under so much pressure to offer their children everything. They are completely overtaxed.”

Winterstein, who has a waiting list of some 700 single parents, bemoans the shortage of state-funded child care, particularly compared to the generous support that Communist East Germany used to offer mothers.

“In the old East we used to get child support and kindergartens at work. Now kindergartens close at 2 or 3 p.m. It’s mad. They should stay open much later,” she said.

While the German birth rate has stagnated around 1.4 children per woman - well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a steady population - fertility plummeted as low as 0.7 children per woman in the former East after unification a decade ago.

One German diaper factory announced recently that the low birthrate was forcing it to lay off dozens of staff.

Demographers say without immigration the population will shrink by up to 15 million by 2050 from its current 82 million, with the average age gradually increasing from 40 to 48.

The traditional population pyramid, where youngsters far outnumber older people, has been upended into an unstable “mushroom” in Germany as those born in the postwar baby boom reach retirement and the birth rate stagnates.

While Germany is grappling with unemployment of around 9 percent, business experts warn that the labor market will be desperately short of workers in just a decade when the slide in the birthrate in eastern Germany filters through.

Around the same time, young people are likely to rebel against the increased contributions they will have to make to keep afloat the generous state pension system supporting their retired parents and grandparents.

Stefanie Wahl, a researcher at the conservative Institute for Economy and Society, says successive governments have tried and failed to overhaul pensions, currently pegged at an unsustainable 70 percent of final wages.

“We have known we were going to encounter this problem for 25 years. Our baby boom was particularly strong, so the fall in the birthrate is even more dramatic,” she said.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s attempt to reduce the level of the state pension while encouraging workers to make up the shortfall by paying into private schemes looks just as likely to fail as his trade union allies refuse to play ball, she said.

“Germans won’t accept a cut in pensions but time is running out. Young people are becoming aware of the unfairness and will find ways to circumvent the state system, either by working illegally or going self-employed,” she said.

A once obscure word has entered common German discourse - “Generationengerechtigkeit” or justice between the generations.

Walter Link, chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into demographic change, stresses that an aging population is not necessarily a bad thing and says Germany must harness its older people to defuse tensions between young and old.

“That the population in Germany is getting older and older is a welcome situation. People want to live as long as possible and as healthily as possible. Class warfare is long ended. We don’t now need a fight between the generations. “The experience of the old and the dynamism of the young must be networked.”

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While older people might have to accept working longer, Link said, young people must accept that they cannot study forever. German students typically graduate around the age of 28, itself a major burden on the economy.

“As long as we have the oldest students and the youngest pensioners, we will never be able to solve this pension problem in Germany,” said Michael Fuchs, president of the country’s foreign trade lobby.

While Germany is slowly recognizing that it needs to open its doors to foreigners to make up for a shortfall of workers, which is already hitting sectors like information technology, immigration can be no cure-all, most experts say. Germany must also lift the retirement age, boost training for older people and make it easier for women to work.

“It is crazy that we are getting healthier, living longer, but stopping work earlier. It is very luxurious and generous,” Wahl said. “If people are still fit, they should be used.”

The Danish Netto discount market chain has started experimenting with employing only over-45s as sales assistants.

“Experienced sales staff cost about double that of a trainee but then they don’t get pregnant or need time off for children,” said Margrit Kuehn, vice chair of Netto in Germany. “I thought they would always be sick and poorly motivated, but practice has shown that they are extremely committed.”

Encouraging women to have more children, pushed by the conservative Christian Social Union, is a more sensitive issue here given memories of Hitler’s policies to push German women to churn out future members of a “master race.”

Family Minister Christine Bergmann admits there are too few day care centers and full-day schools, particularly in western Germany, and says the country must become more child-friendly.

The center-left government has recently pushed a right to part-time work into law. If other plans to make parenting more attractive are realized, Germany’s pensioners might find they are needed to look after their own grandchildren again.