BERLIN — Germany's highest court ruled Tuesday that it was illegal for the federal government to pay parents who chose to care for their toddlers at home rather than send them to publicly subsidized day care, striking down a program that was touted by conservatives.
The benefit, a touchstone issue even before it was made law in 2013, was envisioned as a way to encourage parents to remain home and raise their children, ages 15-36 months, once maternity leave benefits expire.
About 455,000 parents, mostly mothers, now receive the payments.
But critics, who derisively referred to the program as the "stove bonus," argued that it sent women the wrong signal by rewarding them for staying at home.
Many educators also worried that the monthly payments of $163 were most attractive to poorer, often immigrant, families whose children benefit most from early childhood education.
The program was introduced by the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union that, together with Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, forms the conservative bloc in her governing coalition.
The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled that families who care for their toddlers at home are not any more disadvantaged than those who send their toddlers to day care, and therefore could not be eligible for compensation from the federal government.
"The child care subsidy was the wrong path, because it encouraged families not to take advantage of the publicly supported day care and kept women, especially those with young children, out of the job market," said Malu Dreyer, governor of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party that has long opposed the subsidy.
The court decided, however, that each of the country's 16 states could offer the payments to their citizens.