LETTER FROM VIENNA

"The meningococcal vaccine? I recommend it if you send your daughter to nursery at a very early age."

• What do you mean by very early?

• Well... before they're 2 years old."

A discussion overheard in the home of an Austrian pediatrician sums up the shock of adjustment that a Frenchman has to go through when he becomes a father in Vienna. In Austria, despite years of calls to encourage parents to work, starting with mothers, the priority remains to prolong family cocooning for as long as possible.

When presenting her plan for early childhood in September, worth a total of €4.5 billion between now and 2030, the (Conservative) Minister for Families Susanne Raab, said she wanted to concentrate the promised 50,000 new places on children over the age of 1. Only 2% of Austrian children are currently placed in a childcare center or with a caregiver before they are 12 months old, and the minister said she didn't see any demand for this to change. Even beyond that, only 20% of children under two years old have a childcare solution, compared with 58% of French children.

While the official policy is to allow parents to choose when they want to go back to work, the whole system, similar to that in Germany, actually encourages people to stay at home. In particular, Austria offers generous parental leave of 80% of the salary until the child is 12 months old, compared with just €428.71 a month in France. While there is currently a debate in France about increasing this amount in the face of a crying shortage of childcare centers, a more generous system can also have perverse effects.

In Vienna, finding a place in a childcare center or even with a nanny before your child is 12 months old is an uphill battle. We had to contact almost 30 different institutions to find just three – including a French childcare center – that agreed to take our daughter from the age of 8 months, an age we negotiated at length following a Franco-Austrian compromise in our marriage.

Officially, however, the Vienna City Council funds childcare centers on condition that they accept children from an early age, but in reality most refuse to do so, citing lack of staff or infrastructure. In any case, having your child looked after at 8 months is considered stupid at best, dangerous at worst. "It's not good for you or your child," said the director of a childcare center over the phone.

One regional daily even published an entire editorial stating that it had never seen young children go to a childcare center in good spirits. After a while, I got into the habit of telling the establishments that, like many French people, I had been placed in a childcare center from the age of three months by parents who had partly experienced this as a liberation. From France, my mother took the liberty of gently pointing out that, in her opinion, having our daughter looked after starting at eight months was already far too late.

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