The family policy crack in Merkel's election campaign Children are revealing weaknesses in Angela Merkel's political programme where adults have failed. A week before Germany's elections, the chancellor has scarcely had to explain her government's position (or lack of one) on the troubles in Syria. Nor has she had to defend her management of Europe's debt crisis - not surprising, since her Social Democratic challenger Peer Steinbrück helped implement the early stages of it when he served as her finance minister before 2009. Ms Merkel's most uneasy moments have come defending symbolic policies she did not devise, champion or particularly like. None has caused more awkwardness than Betreuungsgeld, a new programme to compensate stay-at-home parents who care for their own children. Betreuungsgeld is a political mystery. It is a conservative programme in a political culture from which conservative forces have disappeared. The Christian Social Union, the Bavarian wing of Ms Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, is a partial exception. It caused a half-decade culture war until it became law, at the CSU's urging, last year. Opposition politicians hate it. They call it a "hearth-and-home bonus." They believe children ought to be in crèches. Almost no member of the CDU, not even the family minister, will boast about the law. But that does not mean no one wants it. Despite the opposition, Betreuungsgeld is not just a goodie for parents or a sop to moralistic fogeys. It is a good idea. Paying parents rests on several perfectly reasonable arguments - many of them classic feminist ones. If the state will pay people to raise Germany's children, why should parents be the only ones disqualified? The work that women have traditionally done at home is not valueless. As a practical matter, any effort to price it will elevate their status. Since the programme does not stipulate which parent stays at home with the child, it does not reinforce any gender roles. If you are a rigorous liberal, who believes every government attempt to influence family life is a distortion, you will not like Betreuungsgeld. The liberal argument is a solid one in principle, but it does not apply in the age of the welfare state. Absent government intervention, any pay-as-you-go welfare state carries out a massive transfer of resources from people who raise children to people who do not. That is because all of the resources used to pay for the needs of the poor and the old in year X come from the productive power of the generation born in the year X minus-30 or X minus-40. Vast sums must be invested over years to build that productive power. States often pick up the bill for formal education. But parents tend to pay for the rest - food, shelter and time. In Ms Merkel's Germany, people do get compensated for their contributions as parents. Betreuungsgeld is a roughly €1.2bn drop in a big €100bn bucket of about 150 different family entitlements, programmes and subsidies. These programmes have been vastly expanded under Ms Merkel, most strikingly to include guaranteed day care places for those who want them. It is true that German women work less - and use state day care less - than those in some other big OECD countries. This may simply be a correlate of prosperity: where people have more money, they will not need to work as much, and it is puzzling why people believe this law of human behaviour should be suspended for modern women. Whatever the cause of German women's different work habits, they are not nearly big enough to explain the extent of the uproar over a programme that only involves a billion euros or so. Tiny as it is, Betreuungsgeld has been met with venom and condescension. Mr Steinbrück has described it as "feeble-minded" but members of Ms Merkel's government have been just as dismissive. Ursula von der Leyen, former family and now labour minister, said in an interview with the news magazine Der Spiegel a year ago that "children need other children," worrying that parents would skip day care and keep their children away from play-dates. Others have raised the spectre of inassimilable immigrants speaking foreign languages in the household. The invective is not just a failure of tact. It is an attempt to shame more traditional women for whom motherhood can be an exclusive vocation in order to flatter the mostly ruling-class women for whom it is not. There are many ideas about what the dignity of women consists in, many tools for achieving it and many ways to measure it. Those who have taken to the warpath over Betreuungsgeld tend to recognise only one such measurement: the labour market. If Betreuungsgeld has become a domestic-policy liability for Ms Merkel, it may be more for her sins against capitalism than for her sins against feminism.