This paper explores the question of how views on Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) have changed in Germany. Our time horizon is broad: We observe the developments from the 1970s until today, linking two research perspectives. On the one hand, we use survey data to analyse how attitudes of the German population towards extra-familial day care have changed over the past decades. On the other hand, we trace changes in the discourse over the same period by looking at debates in the media and in academic publications. This is intended to capture expectations from ECEC and their reconciliations.

Our focus is on day care for one and two-year-olds. Institutions for this age group, often called crèches in Anglo-Saxon countries, have been massively expanded in Germany as in other industrialised countries since the turn of the millennium. In 2002, for example, there were only 51,000 childcare places for children of crèche age in West Germany; two decades later, in 2020, there were about 600,000 children under the age of three in day care. The childcare rate increased more than tenfold, from 2.8% in 2002 to 31.0% in 2020. Even in East Germany, which has had a long tradition of crèche care since socialist times, the number of children under three years of age in care doubled during this period. The childcare rate there rose from 36.7% to 52.7% (Federal Statistical Office, 2004 & 2020).

At the same time, an educational relevance was attributed to day-care centres (for Germany: Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2020; from an international perspective: Yoshikawa & Kabay, 2015). This trend can be observed roughly since the turn of the millennium, when the European Union, among others, favoured a massive expansion of day care for children under three years of age in its Barcelona Goals, which were to enable ECEC on the one hand and maternal employment on the other (European Council, 2002).

Extending the observation period by two to three more decades, we see the enormous change, at least in West Germany. Although the first efforts to pedagogise day care for children under the age of three were made in the 1970s (Arbeitsgruppe Tagesmütter, 1977), such projects met with considerable resistance at that time. Paediatricians in particular, but also psychologists as well as politicians, continuously warned against an expansion of childcare for young children because this would endanger children and weaken families. The fact that the socialist GDR (German Democratic Republic) had greatly expanded crèches was seen as a deterrent in West Germany. Immediately after German reunification in 1990, renowned paediatricians therefore demanded that crèches be completely abolished throughout Germany (Pechstein, 1990).

It is all the more astonishing that such calls did not prevail after reunification in Germany. Instead, crèches obviously changed from a (West German) emergency relief institution to an educational institution. We observe this change in three steps:

• First, we look at the attitude change on the basis of repeated, representative cross-sectional surveys. These data are used to record and differentiate the increasingly positive assessments of extra-familial day care since the 1980s, for example according to gender, employment status and age.
• Second, we observe the discourse on crèche care in West Germany since the 1970s. Here we look at how different academics have judged early non-family childcare and, in parallel, capture the changing assessments of the media.
• Finally, discourse and attitude change are related to each other. The long-term perspective should provide indications whether discursive developments and changes in attitudes are related. This will also test our assumption whether a kind of control loop with interactions (discourses influence attitudes; attitudes influence discourses) can be derived.

The attitude change is analysed with data from the German survey Allbus. These data have been available for West Germany every four years since 1982, and were first collected in East Germany soon after reunification in 1991. In particular, we interpret two items developed in international surveys in the context of gender research (including "A preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works") as attitudes towards non-familial care in the case of maternal employment. The change in scientific-pedagogical discourse is traced with a content analysis of the Zeitschrift für Pädagogik. This journal is the only one that fulfils the requirements of a long publication period and a national and international reputation (Zierer et al., 2013). In parallel, two other corpora will be used for content analysis and hermeneutics to observe how journals of educational practice judged crèche care. In addition, the official youth reports of the German government will be analysed, which lie at the interface of pedagogical science and professional policy and therefore provide clues whether German policy responded to scientific work or was even faster than educational science in recognising crèche care. The inclusion of East Germany poses a challenge. Because in the socialist GDR the media, but also academic publications, were to a large extent directed by the state (Boyer, 2003), a discourse or content analytical approach would hardly show any variance in these publications. Therefore, the analyses of discourse up to 1990 must remain limited to West Germany. Only for the phase after reunification will publications appearing in East Germany be considered. The attitude surveys developed in the West were also not sent into the field in East Germany until after 1990. However, it has been possible to locate two data sets from the former Central Institute for Youth Research, which we use to observe attitudes towards crèche care in GDR cities in 1984 and 1990. These data are analysed for the first time in our project and are compared with western data.

Our analyses of the attitude change point to a rapid change. Descriptively, it can be shown that scepticism towards extra-familial childcare decreased massively in West Germany between 1984 and 2016. Even in East Germany, whose population was already clearly positive about day-care in the 1980s, the data indicate a further decline in scepticism in recent years. Evaluations according to the social background of the respondents will also be available by the EERA Congress. Our discourse analyses indicate that the sciences were not among the drivers of change. Disciplines such as paediatrics warned against an expansion of extra-familial day care in West Germany until the 2010s. The educational sciences took up the topic less dismissively, but do not seem to be among the pioneers and advocates either. German media took up the topic of extra-familial childcare much earlier than the sciences; in particular, they linked the aspects of childcare in crèches and enabling maternal gainful employment partly early on and with a positive connotation. The analyses on the link between discourse and attitude change are not yet completed. Here we are currently testing our hypothesis of a control loop in which changes in one field are linked to differences in the other field.

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