From rags to riches. Janet Thiemann would like to believe that anyone can achieve prosperity. She knows better: Children from upper-class families go to high school three times more often than their peers from working-class families. The situation is similar at German universities. 72 percent of civil servants’ children study, but only 12 percent of workers’ children. Success is not determined by diligence, skill or talent, but by social background.
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Help for everyone
When Janet Thiemann talks about it, every smile disappears from her face. “There are injustices in Germany that we simply cannot afford,” says the 32-year-old emphatically. She grew up sheltered in Stendal in Saxony-Anhalt. Her father is an entrepreneur, introduces children’s holiday camps for his employees, donates money, trains young people in a sports club. “He often said: ‘Anyone who has the opportunity should support those who don’t have this opportunity,'” says Thiemann.
After graduating from high school and a voluntary ecological year, she studied social education at the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences. What it means to grow up in “difficult family circumstances” is something she now experiences and researches at first hand. Since then she has known that the sooner socially disadvantaged children are supported, the greater the success. And: the lower the follow-up costs. “Until children start school, parents have the greatest influence on them,” says Thiemann. “So we have to work with them to get something done with kids.”
The project for socially weak
When one of her lecturers, Prof. Meinrad Ambruster , took exactly this path with the research project “Eltern-AG” in 2002, she was there immediately. The idea: On site, in the “problem area”, parents are motivated to set up an AG. When eight to twelve members come together, a 20-week course begins, which is led by a specially trained mentor.
Once a week, the parents can exchange information about everyday child-rearing for an hour and a half. They learn how to cope with stress , receive professional advice and are put in a position to continue their parents’ club at the end of the course without the mentor. “The focus, however, is on the exchange between the parents,” says Thiemann.
The concept bears fruit
She has led several parent working groups herself, and since 2007 she has been managing director of the MAPP Institute in Magdeburg, which now makes the concept available to social organizations throughout Germany. “Up until the course, many parents often had no support,” explains Thiemann. “They find friends with whom they can talk about their problems at the AG.”
Several studies have now shown that this makes the children – more than 2,500 have been there so far – more emotionally stable and it is easier for them to learn. And almost 70 percent of the parents still meet regularly at the AG six months after the course. A great success for Thiemann and her team. “It still blows my mind,” says the 32-year-old. Now she’s smiling again. Does she want to be a mother herself? “There’s still no time for that. But children are definitely being planned.”
