On a map, it's just a dot on the outskirts of Münster. But in a country struggling to counter an alarmingly low birthrate, Laer is a statistical wonder.

The town of 6,700 has no movie house, no supermarket, no McDonald's. But with 13.5 babies born per 1,000 inhabitants, compared with 8.4 nationwide, it does have something of a baby boom. And in Germany, where the low birthrate has already closed down dozens of schools and put the welfare system at risk, Laer is emerging as a model incubator for pro-growth population policy.

Laer boasts day care organized by paretns, five all-day kindergartens, and a primary school open till 4:30 p.m. More important, locals say, it has an attitude about parenting that makes it easier for moms and dads to work and raise children. With a family policy centered on enabling mothers to work, Laer is moving closer to much of Europe, bucking a deeply entrenched German tradition that mothers should be child-rearers first and foremost.

It is this different mind-set that attracted Meike Ritter, a stewardess for Lufthansa who is often gone days in a row. "Laer was the only place that could guarantee us that our children could be looked after the entire day," Guido Ritter, Meike's husband, said by phone from Laer. "So we said, 'We have to build ourselves a house here.' " Mr. Ritter was offered a job teaching at the University of Muenster, necessitating the move.

Now other communities, eager to encourage couples to have more children, are following Laer's lead.

"Laer grasped the signs of the time," says Kerstin Schmidt, a researcher at the Bertelsmann Foundation in Gütersloh, who helps German towns develop children-friendly work policies. "[It has] created an environment where children and families are welcome. It's smart economically; that's how you attract qualified people."

Public attitudes about - and government support for - working mothers differ widely across Europe.

In France and Scandinavia, the government takes care of children from the get-go through subsidized child care, universal preschool, and all-day schools. In France, which gives huge tax breaks for each child, mothers have few qualms about going back to work within weeks of giving birth. In Sweden, where child care is paid for by the government, it's understood that most women will return to work.

But Germans, along with Italians and Spaniards, have traditionally viewed child- rearing as a private, not a public, responsibility. Indeed, child care in Germany is practically nonexistent in government policies, which offer parents monthly cash allowances and give one-income couples more-favorable tax benefits, tending to reinforce the idea of mothers as caretakers.

In western Germany, just 4 of every 100 children attend day care (though in the former East Germany, that number is 35 percent). In France, 29 percent do; in Denmark, the figure reaches 64 percent.

"Sending your child [to day care in order] to work is seen as something that weakens the family rather than strengthens it," says Gisela Erler, head of Familenservice, a child care consultant based in Berlin. "Women," she says, "feel that they have to choose between family and career."

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