Youth Welfare Office

The Youth Welfare office may visit you after the birth of your child. Such visit is called "early help", and its purpose is to prevent the parents' overburdening by the parenting chores. That means you can ask the visiting Youth Welfare Office staff questions about child care and benefit from their advice. The Youth Welfare Office can also introduce you a midwife or a paediatric nurse before birth. If you are a single parent, in particular, counselling from the youth welfare office can protect you from overstressing. The Youth Welfare Office can also advise you on child care centres. Currently, it can be pretty difficult to find a vacancy in day care centres or kindergartens. For help, you can contact your local youth welfare office.

If you need support as a parent, you can contact your district's social service, also called "General Social Service"("Allgemeiner Sozialer Dienst") or "Municipal Social Service" ("Kommunaler Sozisle Dienst"). Various organisations, such as Caritas, offer such services. Here you can receive advice, participate in courses or benefit from socio-pedagogical family assistance. It is only when you are truly overstretched and exceedingly stressed with the parenting that, as a last resort, the Youth Welfare Office support you to find a suitable foster family or a children's home for your child. This can also be organised just as a temporary remedy. In any case, the protection and well-being of the child should be the main priority.

If you have children and want to separate from your partner or get a divorce, the youth welfare office can support you. It provides advice to you and your partner about your family situation. Here, too, you can contact the district social service, "General Social Service" ("Allgemeiner Sozialer Dienst") or "Municipal Social Service"). Various organisations, such as Caritas, offer this service.

Even after the separation or divorce, both parents should be there for their children. If your partner does not help with the children or has stopped paying child support, you can receive support from the Youth Welfare Office. The Child Support Advancement Act ("Unterhaltvorschussgesetz") specifies that in such cases, the Youth Welfare Office should initiate the funds for child maintenance in advance. To benefit from such service, you should first apply for it. Since July 2017 the payments are no longer time-limited. Only if and when the respective parent is capable of paying child support does the Youth Welfare Office stop the payments and demand the provided funds to be paid back. The amount of child support advance you will receive depends on the age of your child.

If you are an unmarried mother, the Youth Welfare Office offers you advice and assists you in the paternity determination process and the enforcement of child support claims. The Youth Welfare Office can also support you in the court of law if it comes to it.

If you cannot provide for your children, the adoption office at your Youth Welfare Office can help you find new parents for your child. If you are planning to adopt a child, for example, a minor refugee child, you must meet certain requirements which differ from state to state. For more information, visit your local youth welfare office.

The Youth Welfare Office holds the legal guardianship of unaccompanied minor refugees immediately after they enter Germany. According to  § 42 and § 42a of the eighth book of the Social law (SGB VIII), the Youth Welfare Office is also responsible for the children for whom no one in Germany is entitled to care. The unaccompanied minor is then considered to be the "ward" (Mündel") of the Youth Welfare Office. However, the Youth Welfare Office is obliged to look for relatives of the child, at home or abroad. The Office must enable the family to be brought together if the child agrees.

The Youth Welfare Office must inform the family court one month after the arrival of the unaccompanied child or teen. After that, they promptly (within three working days) start to search for a legal representative for the child. The Youth Welfare Office is in charge of looking for a suitable guardian and introducing him/her to the family court as the guardian of the particular child in question ("Einzelvormund"). If no private guardian is found, the Youth Welfare Office itself is appointed by the family court as an organizational guardian ("Amtsvormund"), and the relevant tasks are transferred to a specialized staff at the Youth Welfare Office. It often takes the family court several months until it decides on the guardianship.

Children have the right to grow in healthy and safe circumstances, and the Youth Welfare Office should make sure this is the case for all the children within Germany. Neighbours, relatives, educators or teachers can report to the Youth Welfare Office if they suspect that a child is beaten, abused or neglected. The employees of the Youth Welfare Office then speak to the family and try to find a solution to protect the child. It may be that the Youth Welfare Office has to remove the child from the family in order to protect him or her. If there is no other way of solving the problem with the parents, the family court decides where the child should live in the future.

Child protection also includes compulsory schooling. Depending on the state you live in, compulsory education applies to the children from 5 to 6 or 6 to 7 years of age. If children in the school age do not attend school or do so in a very irregular manner, the Youth Welfare Office steps in. The compulsory schooling also applies to refugee children. In principle, refugee children must start school three to six months after their arrival. If a refugee child has lost his/her documents during the flight, the Youth Welfare Office can determine their age.

The Youth Welfare Office provides youth-specific social services. In other words, it organises and provides youth leisure activities, cultural events and educational programs outside the school to promote self-confidence, independence and social cooperation among the youngsters. The Youth Welfare Office also assists the socially disadvantaged youth to start a career through mentoring and socio- pedagogical work and employment supports.

Protection of the youngsters is the responsibility of the Youth Welfare Offices, and it includes informing teens about alcohol and drug abuse, protection of the youth from unsuitable media contents (teaching children about the computer games and internet contents) and occupational safety.

Based on the German constitution, children and teens under 15 years of age are not allowed to work („Beschäftigungsverbot“). But the students older than 15 may work during the holidays and their safety is protected by Occupational Health and Safety Law ("Jugendarbeitsschutzgesetz" or "„Kinderarbeitsschutzverordnung“"). For instance, the law specifies that children are not allowed to carry heavy loads at work.

Young people between 14 and 17 years (in some cases also up to 18 or 20 years) have to go to the juvenile court in cases of committing criminal offences. In such situations, the youth welfare office supports the child through the court proceedings and mediates between the court of law and the minor. It also provides training to ensure that juveniles will not repeat the offence.

If children or adolescents are beaten, mistreated or sexually abused by their parents, they can call the police on number 110. Alternatively, there are emergency numbers, through which counselling is also provided. You can contact the Federal emergency call number “NumbergegenKummer” under 116111 and benefit from their advice anonymously and free of charge, but unfortunately the counselling is only available in the German language.

In some regions, however, there are multilingual emergency numbers, which you can contact even if you don’t live there. For example, you can reach the Berlin "Emergency Child Protection" 24 hours under 030 - 61 00 66 (Arabic, Turkish, Russian and German). The Berlin hotline for women's problems ("Frauenkrisentelefon") provides counselling on Monday mornings from 10 to 12 in German, English, Persian and Dari under 030 - 6157569. Girls and women can also call multi-lingual Helpline for violence against women ("Gewalt gegen Frauen ") available nationwide under 08000 116 016.