Are you calling kindergarten what we would call pre-school over here?
We call pre-school what you call kindergarten. It's possible that the Skandinavians do that too.
How do other countries handle the costs and challenges of infant and toddler daycare? Are the costs similarly high? Obviously if we lived closer to family this would be less of an issue, but these days it takes 2 incomes to get by, even for my in-laws and parents.
Ok...let me back up a bit. Otherwise we could very possibly run into some problems.
1. You have to appreciate that there is a word in the German language that is situated somewhere between "raising" and "educating". It means the process of "educating" children character-wise/in a non-skill-related fashion. You know, "sharing is good", "violence is bad", "don't interrupt adults when they speak" etc.
You'll see in a moment why this is relevant.
2. I can't really explain to you why, but in Germany a traditional sentiment got stuck that primarily mothers (or fathers if you're modern) are supposed to do this.
It's important that you understand this as a classist entitlement, not a moral commanment. A German mother would
want to shoot herself royally in the foot in order to do this, because that's what it means to be middle class. The parents of children who get raised in all sorts of institutions
must be trash who has to work in some factory 12 hours a day.
I'm sure Americans are not completely unfamiliar with the idea. Just feed it a ton of steroids and you're at the German level. That's the way it used to be. Of course there has been some considerable dialogue over the last two decades on the fact that this is ridiculously impractical and things are changing somewhat.
Ok...there are essentially three types of institutions relevant to your question:
1. There's pre-school. This is essentially comparable to what you call "kindergarten". Children would attend this pre-school for a year (before the actual 1st grade of elementary school) and the whole thing would be somewhat school-ish in nature.
This typically ends at noon, is typically publicly financed and run. Attendance may or may not be mandatory for some or all children (typically it's not). This depends largely on the education policies of the individual state, since the thing is essentially coming from the school side of things. So regulations for pre-schools are usually set by states and the actual facilities are mostly run by circuits, cities and municipalities.
That this comes form the school side of things also means that it's typically completely free.
As far as i know a minority of children ever attend such a pre-school.
2: There's Kindergarten. This is essentially a place where children between ages 3 and 6 (or 5 if they go to pre-school) spend time roughly from 8 am to 1 pm supervised by people with some mediocre paedagogic education, doing largely non-educational things (playing, singing, painting and the like).
Other than pre-school this is a "normal" thing. I'd guess that about 80 to 90% of children attend such a facility. Recently it has become more common for these facilities to stay open into the afternoon.
These Kindergärten are (like many German things) in a nether realm between private and public. Some of them are run by cities and municipalities (not circuits though, that would be beneath them), but most of them are being run by large non-profits (churches, the non-profit monstosities that run most of our healthcare as well, non-profit organisations that originated on the trade union side of things etc.).
This is heavily regulated and subsidised. Sending your kid to kindergarten will cost something like 100 or 200 bucks a month (it may even be cheaper if you are lucky).
In small towns this will work just fine. In a city you may run into trouble cause there's a chronic shortage of these (the shorfall isn't big, but, well chronic, as i said).
Of course who gets their kid in and who doesn't in such a case is heavily regulated, too. Doing this on a first come first serve basis would be exceptional if it happens at all. Though that may apply incidentally, cause it's essentially left to you to phone around to like a copulation ton of these institutions if your city is experiencing such a shortage.
3: There is day care - or as it was until recently understood: Evil communist/french child storage. This is where children below the age of 3 can be placed as well as children 3 to 6 in the afternoon if that is necessary and their kindergarten closes at noon. The price, organisation etc. is comparable to Kindergärten.
The main difference practically is that the shortage is in this case not marginal and managable (from the p.o.v. of the idividual parent) but an unmitigated catastrophe.
Both 2 and 3 are technically entitlements - you have a legal right that placement in such an institution will be provided to you (for Kindergarten this has been true for a long time, for day care this is pretty much brand new and so far very potemkin-ish).
This all being semi-publicly run and heavily subsidized is an absolute necessity. Since, as you know, Germany is very much not in the business of running a "service based economy" doing any of this on the open market is prohibitively expensive.
The whole thing is a permanent political battle in Germany. Counterintuitively (for Americans) the German conservatives are the ones who are always pushing all these funny new entitlements for parents (parental leave, parental premiums etc.), that would be heresy to any American conservative, because they want to maintain the tradition of pre-school children being raised by parents at home (except for the few hours of Kindergarten a day).
It's the liberals who are pushing the expansion of all these facities. You know, cause they are commies and want to live like one did in the GDR.
Due to reality's bias liberals appear to be winning albeit slowly.
Anyway, once you are done with all that and your kid is 6, it will attend a public elementary school, which is, once more, regulated by a state, run (typically) by a municipality, circuit or city, and has teachers who are tenured public servants who cannot strike and cannot be fired.
This elementary school would (until recently) educate your child on an irregular schedule for roughly 3 to 4 hours a day in the morning and completely shut down at noon. For real. No joke.
And since your child was already 6 you coundn't send it to any other institution. For real. No joke.
(This is changing rather fast. After 50 years of loads of women being in the workforce people have suddenly realised what an incredibly stupid idea this was.)
This would be pretty much exactly the point where you, if you were the mother, would migrate to a mental place of undying frustration and develop the stern determination to warn your daughters about this fecal matter and tell them to not have kids.
Which is what German women did, like, decades ago.
I hope there is at least some overlap between these ramblings and what you actually wanted to know.
Even were brought there (though it was a short walk from the school). Me and many others of my class went there.
