It is a disillusioning finding that the German Children’s Fund has made in its 2024 Children’s Report: Two thirds of adults, but only just over half of ten to 17 year olds (54 percent) trust today’s generation of children and young people to take responsibility for preserving democracy as adults. 23 percent of young people are skeptical here, and another 23 percent answered “don’t know.”
This is the result of a representative survey of 666 children and young people and 1,006 adults conducted by the Verian opinion research institute. The children and young people cite their poor level of information as one of the main reasons for their lack of confidence in their own power to shape things. Only nine percent of them believe that they know enough about democratic processes.
The children’s welfare organization calls the result “frightening”. Democracy is a form of society that has to be relearned by every generation, says Thomas Krüger, President of the German Children’s Welfare Organization. “The overall low level of trust in the ability of children and young people to preserve democracy in Germany in the future is a cause for great concern.”
The children’s rights organisation is therefore committed to embedding democracy education in educational institutions at an early stage. “Our democracy is currently being challenged in many areas like never before. We must manage to breathe life into it, preserve its conditions and defend it proactively against threats,” said Krüger on Friday when presenting the report.
However, passion and interest in democracy must also be awakened at home: at least that is how the adults surveyed see it. For 85 percent of them, the family environment is primarily responsible for promoting democratic beliefs and skills in children and young people.
Children and young people, on the other hand, see the main responsibility for this as lying with schools and daycare centers (73 percent). Above all, they demand that current political events should be better discussed and explained in school lessons (89 percent).
The ten to 17-year-olds surveyed also gave very clear reasons for the lack of satisfaction with democracy. 88 percent of them complained that people in Germany were treating each other with less and less respect and were less open to different opinions. Here, young people were even more critical than adults (81 percent).
The children’s report states: “On the one hand, this shows the often underestimated importance of social coexistence for democracy; on the other hand, this mood underlines the currently increasingly described brutalization of political discourse, which is detrimental to the preservation of democracy.”