Isaksen&Bikova2019 Egalitarian Ideologies on the Move

Abstract

This article explores the complexities and ambiguities in Norwegian families’ interaction with the public childcare system. Public childcare is a cornerstone in the ‘double dividend’, that is, social policies that equalize children’s life chances and support gender equality. The dual earner/dual carer family model interacts with full-time participation in the labour market, gender equality at home and universal access to childcare, and has made contemporary childhood multi-local and mobile. As part of their everyday organization of care, parents have to establish connections between home, work and childcare. Here, we use the concept of ‘care loops’ to analyse how local families ‘do’ combinations of welfare services, family resources, gender ideologies and the labour of migrant care workers. Drawing on empirical research on migrant care workers in Norwegian families and discussing recent studies of majority families’ care practices, the article discusses the paradox that egalitarian norms and ideals might generate extra workloads that in turn create demands for migrant care workers and trigger geopolitical inequality

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0958928719867789
Journal of European Social Policy
2019, Vol. 29(5) 627 –639
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0958928719867789
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Journal Of
European
Social Policy
Introduction
In March 2012, a divorced mother of two small chil-
dren asked in an internet forum for parents for advice:
I am a mother of two small children. The oldest starts
school in august and the youngest is one year old. After
my partner and I split up, my strategy has been to find
a job in the neighborhood close to childcare and school.
It takes me a 7 minutes’ drive to work. However, a
larger agency has bought our company, and within a
few months employers will move to another part of the
town, may be a 30 minutes’ drive from home. The
youngest child has been offered a place in the local
Egalitarian ideologies on the
move: Changing care practices
and gender norms in Norway
Lise Widding Isaksen
Mariya Bikova
Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Abstract
This article explores the complexities and ambiguities in Norwegian families’ interaction with the public
childcare system. Public childcare is a cornerstone in the ‘double dividend’, that is, social policies that equalize
children’s life chances and support gender equality. The dual earner/dual carer family model interacts with
full-time participation in the labour market, gender equality at home and universal access to childcare, and
has made contemporary childhood multi-local and mobile. As part of their everyday organization of care,
parents have to establish connections between home, work and childcare. Here, we use the concept of
‘care loops’ to analyse how local families ‘do’ combinations of welfare services, family resources, gender
ideologies and the labour of migrant care workers. Drawing on empirical research on migrant care workers
in Norwegian families and discussing recent studies of majority families’ care practices, the article discusses
the paradox that egalitarian norms and ideals might generate extra workloads that in turn create demands
for migrant care workers and trigger geopolitical inequality.
Keywords
Care loops, childcare, double dividend, gender equality, geopolitical inequality, migrant care workers,
social inequality
Corresponding author:
Lise Widding Isaksen, Department of Sociology, University of
Bergen, Postbox 7802, 5020 Bergen, Norway.
Email: lise.isaksen@uib.no
867789ESP0010.1177/0958928719867789Journal of European Social PolicyIsaksen and Bikova
research-article2019
Article

628 Journal of European Social Policy 29(5)
kindergarten, and I have to accept or not before the end
of this week. If I accept it, I have to be in the
kindergarten at 7.30 with the youngest and then follow
the other one to school. It is in the rush hours in the
morning, and I can earliest be at work at 08.15–8.30,
and then I have to leave before 16.00 to pick up before
childcare closes at 16.30. Every day I lose 30–
45 minutes, but I can work at nights. I have to decide if
I should look for another job closer to home or if I
should employ an au pair. Employing an au pair, I will
have less stressful mornings and there will be someone
home if I am stuck in a traffic jam. However, our house
is quite small, and it will be a challenge to have a
stranger living in our home. Another thing is that au
pairs can work only 30 hours per week. It will be a hard
economic burden to pay both for childcare and for an
au pair. I have a good income, but with two children, it
will be too economically hard to reduce working hours.
How do other divorced mothers solve challenges
related to bringing and picking up children from school
and childcare when having long-distance work travels?
(Extract from an internet forum about parenting, 22
March 2012, anonymous author)
This extract from the parenting forum illustrates some
of the challenges and dilemmas that a single mother
faces in balancing work, care arrangements and
finances. A decade ago, the option of employing au
pairs to take care of children was not on the list of
available care services. Today, contemporary migra-
tion policies through the European au pair scheme are
changing the established ‘double dividend’ policy.
This change, as we illustrate, is initiated by families
and is taking place when families interact with public
childcare institutions. Central in the Norwegian wel-
fare state’s ‘double dividend’ policy is the universal
high-quality childcare system that contributes to
equalizing children’s life chances and supports a
mother’s integration into the labour market.
Gender egalitarian processes and welfare policies
aimed to reduce the social inequalities among chil-
dren seem to work well among Norwegian families.
Nevertheless, we are witnessing an increase in fami-
lies who employ migrant care workers. In the period
from 2002 to October 2018, 15,478 third-country
nationals received au pair visas and almost 80 per-
cent of these were given to Filipino citizens
(Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI),
2018). The demand for au pairs reflects the fact that
a growing number of families have problems with
the reconciliation of work and family life. The dual
earner/dual carer model is a prioritized political goal
and has been supported through the expansion of
public childcare. Reforms have been relatively suc-
cessful, but the discrepancy between the political
rhetoric and real-world experience remains (Eldèn
and Anving, 2016; Ellingsæter et al., 2017).
Relating to public discourses, one easily gets the
impression that egalitarian ways of living modern
family life is an established hegemonic norm. When
contemporary families choose to outsource house-
work to migrant care workers like au pairs, it does
not mean that gender equality and shared parenting
are less important for parents. On the contrary, many
experience themselves as getting a more gender
symmetrical relation when a paid worker does the
heaviest housework (Isaksen, 2010).
In Sweden, the failure to realize the dual earner/dual
carer model has initiated various political initiatives.
One of these is the RUT (Cleaning, Maintenance and
Laundry) tax deduction that gives families a tax credit
for the purchase of cleaning services enabling women
to participate in the labour market on more equal terms
with men (Eldèn and Anving, 2016). In order for a fam-
ily to get the tax credit, the cleaning service must be
purchased from a registered company rather than ille-
gally. The objective of the reform is to turn undeclared
work into legal work. Another expected outcome is
greater social equality between groups of workers and
more gender equality.
In Norway, migration policies like the Strasbourg
Agreement (Council of Europe (COE), 1969) also
known as ‘The European Agreement on “au pair”
placement’ offers families the possibility to host
young foreigners (aged 17–30), who, in exchange
for board, lodging and pocket money, provide the
host family with childcare and housework. The
Agreement was opened for signature by member
states of the COE on November 1969. Norway was
one of the member states that ratified the Agreement
(Cox, 2015).
The au pair scheme is discursively constructed as a
scheme for cultural exchange, but has in practice
functioned as a way for families to buy cheap migrant
labour. For young Europeans and third-country
nationals, the scheme has offered a way to enter, work
and take higher education in Norway (Øien, 2009).
With the European Union (EU) enlargements in 2004

Isaksen and Bikova 629
and 2007, however, the number of au pairs from the
new member states decreased as they could move
freely between the EU and the European Economic
Area (EEA) countries and take jobs in the EU/EEA
labour market. For non-EU/EEA nationals, however,
the enlargement of the EU meant stronger control of
its outer borders and reduced opportunities for entry
into the EU. This made the au pair scheme even more
attractive for third-country nationals, and while the
number of Polish au pairs decreased from 108 in 2002
to 1 in 2009, the number of Filipino au pairs increased
more than 10 times in the same period – from 71 in
2002 to 1318 in 2009 (UDI, 2018). Geopolitical
changes in Europe and the popularity of Norway as a
destination country are not the only reasons for the
increased number of Filipino au pairs in Norway.
Norwegian families’ preferences for Filipino au pairs
are based on racialized stereotypes of Filipino women
as submissive workers and ‘natural’ caregivers, who
are also very good at housework (Bikova, 2008;
Hovdan, 2005). Today, au pairing is seen as a part of a
larger historical legacy of paid domestic work and
contemporary transnational feminized migration for
work.
The article is organized as follows: as a starting
point of our discussion of egalitarian norms and prac-
tices in Norway, in the first part of the article, we intro-
duce the concept of ‘double dividend’. To explore how
parents organize the daily care for their children, we
use ‘care loops’ as a sensitizing concept to shed light
on daily mobilities between home, work and childcare.
We then look into how local care practices increas-
ingly relate to international migration and explore the
role of institutional interactions for the increasing
demand for migrant care workers. Finally, we discuss
how care practices and care loops that aimed to be ben-
eficial for social equality and gender equality cannot
be a question of macroeconomics alone and turn the
‘double dividend’ upside down in order to show how
egalitarian practices are done on the micro level.
‘Double dividend’ policies as a
social practice
In Norway, 97 percent of all children between 3 and
5 years and 90 percent of children between 1 and
2 years attend kindergarten (Ellingsæter et al., 2017).
This universal childcare system is of great impor-
tance for children’s life chances and at the same time
supports gender equality. Esping-Andersen (2015,
2016) conceptualizes the double role of the childcare
system as a ‘double dividend’ to emphasize its dou-
ble contribution for achieving social equality and
gender equality.
From conditional attitudes to the suitability of
institutional care, in the period 2002–2010, the
majority view shifted towards ‘childcare services
only’ being considered as the best form of care for
preschool children. This occurred among mothers in
all socio-economic groups. The heightened support
for public childcare as the best form of care reflects
changing ideas about what childcare is good for
(Ellingsæter et al., 2017).
Public childcare is an institution in which soci-
ety invests not only to support children’s social,
cognitive and psychological development but also
to encourage gender symmetrical relations in fami-
lies and the labour market. The ‘double dividend’
thesis connects gender equality and public child-
care on a macro level as an institutional interaction
between welfare, family and labour-market poli-
cies. The theory claims that these institutional
interactions will be beneficial for society as a whole
and lead to less social inequality, less child poverty,
fewer welfare expenses and more equality between
men and women (Esping-Andersen, 2015). If we
move the macroeconomic focus in the ‘double divi-
dend’ perspective to a focus on daily life activities
in families with small children, we can see that
families not only work hard to ‘do’ gender egalitar-
ian lives, they also work hard to interact properly
with children’s childcare units. All this work is rel-
atively invisible in macroeconomic research on the
‘double dividend’ and as a result is undertheorized
and ignored.
The ‘double dividend’ thesis suggests that in the
longer run, equalizing effects of universal childcare
may contribute to sustain the future of a social
equality–oriented welfare society. This again fosters
economic growth, greater motivation of citizens and
higher propensity to invest (Bornschier et al., 2005).
The idea is that all citizens will benefit from gender
equality and social equality that is achieved in the
established everyday interactions between home,

630 Journal of European Social Policy 29(5)
work and childcare. The question is as follows: how
and who initiate and ‘do’ the processes that lead to
these social benefits?
We draw attention to the numerous activities that
families need to organize as a part of their ‘doings’ of
gender egalitarian family lives, and discuss how parents
struggle to live up to the local expectations of involved
parenthood. By showing how families connect homes,
employment and childcare in an egalitarian way and for
the purpose of achieving greater equality, we approach
the ‘double dividend’ from below. In this analytical
work, we use ‘care loops’ (see ‘Introduction’, [Isaksen
and Näre] 2019) as a sensitizing concept to show how
families connect to kindergartens and organize work
and care journeys. Our focus on the different connec-
tions and journeys in parents’ doings of egalitarian fam-
ily lives is informed by mobility literature.
Connecting homes, work and
childcare
The number of care-related travels has increased for all
groups in the population, but most of all for families
with children below school age (Transportøkonomisk
Institutt (TØI), 2017). Care-related everyday mobili-
ties, however, are not only about transport and logis-
tics but also about relationships (Urry, 2007). For
example, parents cooperate with other parents not only
to establish ride shares but also to help each other.
However, mothers are most often responsible for the
organization of this work. Mobility related to chil-
dren’s involvement in kindergartens and social activi-
ties requires not only daily planning, attention to detail,
cooperation with other parents and making of time
budgets but also an awareness of how parents’ perfor-
mances can influence children’s status among staff and
playmates (Bach, 2014). These different mobilities
create connections or ‘loops’ between homes, kinder-
gartens, workplaces and the sites where hobbies and
sports take place and require patching of time and
resources. Understanding care as patchwork, we are
inspired by Laura Balbo’s (1987) work on the ‘patch-
work quilt’ as a metaphor describing women’s work.
Balbo (1987) writes,
What is involved in women’s work? Much planning
and imagination is needed. Women make decisions on
the basis of how much time they have; how much
money; what distances they have to travel; who is
available to substitute them, to help, to share; who
needs what . . . They anticipate, budget, establish
priorities. They carry the responsibility for this
apparently trivial decision-making process: they work
endlessly at their crazy quilts, striving for balance,
trying to introduce some methods and pattern. (p. 49)
While Balbo had in mind the Italian service society in
the 1980thies and women’s visions of what is best for
their families, today Norwegian mothers put visions
of gender equality and early education for children
into the ‘crazy quilts’ when weaving together daily
care loops. Care loops is a spatial concept aimed at
grasping the complexities in the organization of fami-
lies’ everyday mobilities. To shed light on how care
loops put together welfare services, labour-market
policies and gender ideologies, we connect Balbo’s
‘crazy quilt’ concept to Urry’s work on mobilities and
to local visions of gender equality. Behind the curtains
of successful gender equality policies, realities are
that mothers are more involved in childcare and
housework than fathers. Still there exists a close link
between female dignity, clean homes and clean
clothes (Døving and Klepp, 2010). The myriad of
small things related to daily care loops like packing
children’s schoolbags, bringing warm clothes to
childcare, talking with childcare staff and organizing
daily drop-offs remains woman’s work (Smeby and
Brandth, 2013).
The last decade’s expansion of public childcare to
support the dual earner/dual carer model has led to
important, though moderate, changes towards less tra-
ditional gender division of housework. Mothers’ mas-
sive support for public childcare does not change the
fact that families still have different combinations of
care practices and strategies. Highly educated moth-
ers are very much in favour of public childcare ser-
vices, but rather in ‘combination with’ paid household
services such as the employment of migrant care
workers (Ellingsæter et al., 2017). Looking at how
daily care loops connect families differently to public
childcare institutions, we shed light on how parents
combine local and global care practices.
The increased popularity of the au pair scheme is
an example of the incorporation of ‘global care
chains’ into local care practices (Bikova, 2017).

Isaksen and Bikova 631
However, unlike other European welfare states,
where middle-class families turn to private solutions
because of insufficient public support for childcare,
in Norway, the employment of migrant care workers
is rather a strategy to facilitate the care loops between
home and childcare. To illustrate these dynamics, we
draw on empirical studies of Norwegian families
who employ migrant care workers (Bikova, 2008,
2017) as well as on studies of how families of differ-
ent socio-economic backgrounds negotiate, practice
and ‘do’ gender equality in their daily lives (Aarseth,
2010, 2014; Smeby and Brandth, 2013; Stefansen
and Farstad, 2010).
Egalitarian norms and care
practices
In their study among 58 Norwegian families with
children aged 0 to 3, Stefansen and Farstad (2010)
identify two different models of care based on how
parents of different socio-economic backgrounds
think of care and combine the opportunity structures
offered by public childcare. Middle-class parents
perceive their 1-year-olds as independent and com-
petent beings who are capable of utilizing the peda-
gogical content of the kindergarten. Working-class
parents, on the contrary, think of children under the
age of 3 as in need of protection from stressing days
in kindergartens, and prefer home-based care until
the child is 3 years old. Both socio-economic groups
support the dual earner/dual carer model. However,
working-class mothers, more often than middle-
class mothers, think ‘families first’ and adjust work-
ing life to family life.
Recent studies of gender ideologies in the
Norwegian upper middle class (Aarseth, 2010, 2014)
show important differences in the way highly edu-
cated urban families think about and practice gender
equality. Urban, upper-middle-class heterosexual
couples exhibit a high degree of a gender equal divi-
sion of childcare and housework and an aspiration for
including men even more in daily household chores.
Among business elite families where both parents
work in corporate finance, there is an inclination
towards a more traditional gendered division of labour
especially after the birth of the first child. Women in
these families, despite having careers in the corporate
business, often choose to work fewer hours or even
quit jobs after becoming mothers. These same moth-
ers, despite working reduced hours or being full-time
homemakers, would often hire au pairs and delegate
the housework to them, so that they can devote them-
selves to childrearing and home design. Being actively
involved in children’s social and educational activi-
ties, business elite mothers focus on participation and
management of their offspring’s social relationships,
health and sports (Aarseth, 2014).
Investments in children’s activities are part of
parents’ strategies to enhance their children’s social
capital and are an expression of privilege that creates
social inequality (Bach, 2014). When reducing
working time, upper-middle-class mothers get more
time to follow up children’s activities and to engage
with other parents. Parents use ‘time’ and ‘over-
skudd’ (surplus energy) as a social resource and a
marker of social distinctions, and work actively to
improve children’s ability to make friends and build
social capital (Bach, 2014). Children from families
with less resourceful parents may end up having
fewer friends and less social capital even though
attending public childcare services that aim to mini-
mize social inequalities. Bach (2014) concludes that
elite parents unintentionally generate informal pro-
cesses of social inequality that in turn contribute to
the reproduction of these inequalities. Wealthy par-
ents have the social and material resources to invest
in ride sharing with other parents. They also have the
time and resources to avoid dropping children off
too early at kindergarten or picking them up too late
and the opportunity to transport children to friends
or social events by car rather than by bus.
Smeby and Brandth (2013) argue that care prac-
tices related to children’s everyday life in kindergar-
ten have become an important part of contemporary
gender equality practices. Childcare is an arena
where parents feel their success as gender egalitarian
partners is at stake. How and who organizes daily
care loops is, in other words, a piece of (primarily)
women’s care work and a social marker of more or
less successful management of gender egalitarian
practices.
Research literature focuses mainly on how par-
ents from different socio-economic groups combine
childcare and paid work (Stefansen and Farstad,

632 Journal of European Social Policy 29(5)
2010), and how gender equality within families is
negotiated among highly educated couples (Aarseth,
2010, 2014). Wealthy parents invest energy in con-
necting family life and children’s activities in kin-
dergarten and the neighbourhood (Bach, 2014).
Smeby and Brandth (2013) and Bach (2014) discuss
institutional interactions between families and pub-
lic childcare, and identify how daily care practices in
egalitarian institutions might express general pro-
cesses of reproduction of social inequality and gen-
der inequality. There is, however, less attention to
how the different activities constituting women’s
patchwork of care relate to international migration.
Mothers, more often than fathers, carry the responsi-
bility for preparing daily care loops. They work out
transport plans and take care of all kinds of practical
matters. The increased use of migrant care workers
like Filipina au pairs in Norway must be understood
as a part of this particular picture. Drawing on
empirical studies of au pair migration to Norway, in
the section that follows, we show how care loops and
patchwork of care connect international migration.
Migrant care workers in
egalitarian contexts
Norway is often viewed as one of the prototypes of
social democratic welfare regimes with comprehen-
sive social and family policies universally available
to the population. Drawing on empirical research on
Norwegian employers of migrant care workers
(Bikova, 2008) and research on Filipino au pairs in
Norway (Bikova, 2017),1 this section analyses how
Norwegian families’ care loops connect to and inter-
act with international migration. We base our discus-
sion on data from these two separated, but
thematically related, empirical studies.
The first is a study of Norwegian employers of au
pairs and explores why Norwegian families hire au
pairs despite the availability of affordable, high-
quality public childcare (Bikova, 2008). The study is
based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with
10 Norwegian families and looks at how they negoti-
ate and organize the daily care for their children. The
interviews were conducted in 2007 to 2008 and took
place in the families’ homes, which provided infor-
mation about their living standards. Based on their
education, professional occupations and the material
standards of their homes, the families may be seen as
representing different socio-economic groups. Two
of the families are single-parent families with the
mothers having the main responsibility for the daily
care of their children. In both of these families, the
children attended public daycare, but were, in addi-
tion, looked after by an au pair. The single-parent
families are also the families with fewest resources
in terms of economic and social capital. The other
eight families are two-parent, dual-earner families
with substantial resources in terms of social and eco-
nomic capital. The parents in these families occupy
prestigious and well-paid positions in the oil indus-
try, the financial sector, research, media and com-
munication, and all hold university degrees.
The second study is an ethnographic study of
Filipino au pair migration to Norway and is based on
ethnographic fieldwork among Filipino au pairs in
Norway and the au pairs’ families in the Philippines
(Bikova, 2017). The study explores how Filipino au
pairs rationalize and go about au pairing in Norway,
and how they experience being au pairs in Norway.
The study explores also how the migration to
Norway has impacts on the au pairs’ own families;
16 interviews with Filipino au pairs in Norway were
conducted in the period 2010–2012. All the au pairs
in this study are women, all with secondary educa-
tion or higher education, aged 21 to 30 years old at
the time they arrived in Norway as au pairs. Two of
the au pairs were married at the time of the interview,
one was separated from the father of her child. The
two who were married had children whom they left
in the care of family members in the Philippines.
Three of the au pairs had male partners in the
Philippines, while the rest of the au pairs were single
at the time they came to Norway.
All the 16 women in this study had either started
or completed higher education prior to coming to
Norway as au pairs. Five of the women dropped out
of college due to pregnancies or financial problems.
Higher education in the Philippines is expensive and
requires financial resources to complete. Some of
the au pair women planned to complete their educa-
tion with the money earned from au pairing in
Norway. The rest of the au pair women held degrees
in nursing, preschool education, business and

Isaksen and Bikova 633
administration, international relations and European
studies. However, only a couple of the women had
jobs related to their education. To provide for them-
selves and their families, they had taken jobs in the
service sector.
Of the 16 women, 9 had been working as domes-
tic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle
East or as au pairs in Europe. The rest of the women
had no prior migration experience before coming to
Norway. In addition to economic reasons for migra-
tion, however, the women in this study pointed out
personal reasons such as exiting a dysfunctional
relationship, creating a better future for themselves
or simply experiencing something new.
For the purpose of this article, we draw mainly on
the fieldwork conducted in Norway as it shows best
how local care loops are done. Combining data from
these two studies (Bikova, 2008, 2017) gives us a
view into the making of the local care loops from the
perspectives of both the employing families and the
migrant care workers. It is, however, important to
note that the analysis of gender egalitarian practices
that we offer here is based on interviews with the
majority population. We have not looked into varie-
ties of gender egalitarian norms and values in
migrant families living in Norway.
Based on the interview material from these two
studies, in the following, we illustrate how
Norwegian families organize daily care of children.
The families draw on available resources such as
time, money, and care practices and create care loops
as they are on the move between their homes, work-
places, children’s kindergartens and free-time activi-
ties. Care loops are time- and energy-consuming
activities, and an increasing number of families feel
that they need help to make daily work–family bal-
ances. However, some families have the resources to
take care of the care loops themselves and outsource
housework to au pairs.
Orchestrating everyday life:
care loops in different family
constellations
In Norway, public childcare of high quality is avail-
able and affordable, but due to its restricted opening
hours – usually from 07.30 to 16.00 – it needs to be
carefully orchestrated with parents’ work schedules.
This orchestration becomes particularly demanding
when there is only one parent in the family. Two of
the families in Bikova (2008) are single-mother fam-
ilies who did not have partners or family members
living nearby to assist them with childcare. One of
the mothers had three children living with her, two of
whom were attending kindergarten and one was of
school age. The other single mother had a newborn
baby and daughter aged 12. Not having partners with
whom to share the daily organization of childcare
makes the orchestration of the everyday activities
complicated for these families. Children had to be
delivered to kindergartens, schools and sports activi-
ties, and these logistics had to be coordinated with
work schedules and opening hours. For both of the
single mothers, hiring an au pair was a way to man-
age the logistics of the everyday life. The au pairs
were asked to stay at home with one of the children,
while the mother was driving the other to sports
activities or picking up a child from the kindergar-
ten. The au pairs were also delegated quite a lot of
housework such as cleaning the house, preparing
lunch boxes for the children and cooking dinners.
Managing the logistics of the everyday life is a
challenge for two-parent families as well, especially
when both parents are working or pursuing careers.
This is how one of the families describes their
situation:
I have a husband who commutes. He goes to work on
Monday and comes back on Thursday. I work full-time
in the oil industry as well. It’s a terrible rush – travels,
offshore work and meetings in other towns. With a
husband who is not at home, and if I am to work, I have
to have help in the house. (Two-parent family, three
children aged 11, 9 and 4 at the time of the interview, in
Bikova, 2008)
Another family describes their everyday life as
follows:
We have demanding jobs both of us. She is a researcher
and works between 55–60 hours a week! But she has
the flexibility to choose when to work except for
certain projects that she cannot plan on her own. Still,
we have to plan everything. I work as . . . in fact I have

634 Journal of European Social Policy 29(5)
had several jobs during the time we had au pairs. These
were all jobs in finance and management. There had
been high work pressure at times and I have also
worked 60 hours a week and it had been difficult to
predict when the busy periods will come. (Two-parent
family, two children aged 4 and 2 at the time of the
interview, in Bikova, 2008)
These quotations describe families with jobs in the
oil industry, the finance sector and research, and
show how difficult it is to implement the dual-earner/
dual-carer model when both parents pursue careers.
What is common for these families is that they did
not receive much help from their own parents due to
the fact that they were either living active lives or
pursuing careers themselves. As one of the inform-
ants points out,
My husband’s father lives nearby, but he works full
time. None of our parents are retired. They are very
busy with activities that modern grandparents are
engaged in – golf, French course, Pilates. And if they
are to come for a visit, it has to be planned weeks
ahead. (Two-parent family with three children aged 8,
7 and 2 at the time of the interview, in Bikova, 2008)
Even though they have busy work schedules and
are not receiving help from their own parents, the
families were not willing to reduce their working
time as it could result in lost income and lost oppor-
tunities for career advancements. Rather, they
choose to hire au pairs:
If we were to reduce our working time, we would lose
income. It’s more profitable to be a full-time worker
and hire an au pair. And your employer is more
satisfied. (Two-parent family with three children aged
8, 7 and 2 at the time of the interview, in Bikova, 2008).
We have chosen not to reduce our working hours, but
rather manage the time-bind by hiring an au pair. The
intention is not to do less for the children but rather get
more time for cooking and being together. We are also
more flexible when it comes to spending time with the
children. (Two-parent family, two children aged 4 and
2 at the time of the interview, in Bikova, 2008)
In families like these, the au pairs are hired to facili-
tate the logistics of the everyday life, but unlike in
single-parent families where the au pairs are involved
in the bringing of children to and from kindergarten,
in the two-parent families, the au pairs are less
involved in the daily care for children. As one of the
Filipino au pairs working for such a family points out,
We [the au pair] just have to work five hours in the house.
So they don’t really ask me to look after the children. The
important thing to them is that there is someone who will
clean the house. So I don’t have to look after them. I just
clean the house. (Filipino au pair, mid-20s, works for a
family with three children, in Bikova, 2017)
Another Filipino au pair working for an urban mid-
dle-class family with two children shares a similar
story:
The mother is the one who sends the child to the
kindergarten. The father picks him up in the afternoon.
They spend the evenings playing with the kids.
(Filipino au pair, late 20s, works for a family with two
children, in Bikova, 2017).
As these interview extracts illustrate, the au pairs in
the two-parent families are not providing care for the
employing families’ children. Still, by doing house-
work, the au pairs are indirectly participating in the
making of the local care loops as they help parents
generate surplus time that is invested in developing
children’s social capital.
The popularity of public childcare
The host families’ daily care loops are constituted by
their travels to and from home, groceries, work, kin-
dergarten, schools and free-time activities. Au pairs
are either involved in the making of these loops by
bringing children to and from kindergarten or are
facilitating the making of the loop by doing tasks
that enable parents to spend more time with their
children. For all of the families, however, public
childcare was the main source of childcare as illus-
trated in the following interview extract:
We are very satisfied with the kindergarten and we think
that we can’t just cut away the whole pedagogical side of
the kindergarten. But we could probably use the au pair
for more childcare. May be if our parents were living

Isaksen and Bikova 635
nearby, probably they could have been a substitution, but
we get so much more with an au pair. (Two-parent
family with three children aged 8, 7 and 2 at the time of
the interview, in Bikova, 2008)
This is what one of the families shares when elabo-
rating on their decision to hire an au pair:
We haven’t even considered letting the au pair look
after our children. We have never considered dropping
the kindergarten . . . We have had a kindergarten all the
time. We did not have an au pair to look after the
children. We had an au pair to make our everyday life
more flexible. We don’t think that the au pair could
satisfy . . . they could not be an alternative to the
kindergarten. But they help to bring to and from the
kindergarten, prepare lunch packets, so that we get
more relaxed mornings and afternoons. I am a fan of the
kindergarten. I think kindergarten is best for children.
(Two-parent family with children aged 13 and 8 at the
time of the interview, in Bikova, 2008)
The host father in this same family adds the
following:
In families like ours, children are in childcare. There
are almost no children taken care of at home. So if our
children were to be taken care of at home, they would
not be able to meet other children.
Speaking about their motivation for hiring an au
pair, several of the female informants expressed an
opinion that finding a way to combine childcare with
paid employment was their own rather than their
husband’s responsibility.
Well, it was me who found out that if I am to work I
have to find an au pair. If I can’t find an au pair then I
have to quit my job as long as I have a husband who is
not at home. (Two-parent family with children aged 11,
9 and 4 at the time of the interview, in Bikova, 2008)
Even though the decision to hire an au pair was taken
collectively by both parents, the initiative of finding
one is usually taken by the women. It is also the
women who instruct the au pairs in what tasks are to
be done at home and how these are to be performed.
It was me who had to let them [the au pairs] know if
something was to be done in another way or if it wasn’t
done and needed to be done, or when they were
supposed to have free. It was me who had to negotiate
with them so that he [the host father] could be a friend
with them. It was me who made the written contract
with them. (Two-parent family with children aged 11, 9
and 7 at the time of the interview, Bikova, 2008)
Delegating household chores to the au pairs and
instructing them how the work is to be done is an
important task that the women do not leave to their
male partners. Women see the organization and man-
agement of everyday routine tasks as their own
responsibility, thus reproducing traditional gendered
division of labour.
Shifting childcare discourses
Using care loops as a sensitizing concept and a meta-
phor for families’ travels from home to childcare,
work and back again, we can see new emerging
social patterns and complexities. Norwegian kinder-
gartens, as an early education system, have expanded
significantly during the last decades, and now form
the cornerstone of gender equality policies in
Norway. The availability and affordability of public
childcare services have been crucial in improving
women’s integration in the labour market. Opening
hours intend to balance working families’ needs and
to support full-time positions.
Since the 2000s, kindergartens have undergone an
ideological shift from a traditional social pedagogics
to an investment in human capital. Childcare services
are now part of a lifelong learning and an investment
in productive citizens (Ellingsæter et al., 2017;
Ministry of Children and Family Affairs, 2003). In
2010, the less educated mothers in Norway, more than
the most highly educated mothers, were inclined to
favour public childcare as the best childcare solution.
Higher educated mothers more often prefer public
childcare ‘in combination with’ (Ellingsæter et al.,
2017). Combining public childcare and employment
of an au pair is a relatively expensive solution that
affluent families, more often than average families,
can afford (Eldèn and Anving, 2016).
In this study, we find that a growing number of
dual earner/dual carer families combine public child-
care with Filipino au pairs. Host families support and
prefer public childcare. They focus on ideas that

636 Journal of European Social Policy 29(5)
childcare is beneficial for children’s cognitive and
social development. Reducing hours in childcare is
not an option nor is the idea to reduce working hours
to manage the stress. Also host families in Sweden
point to the stress concerning leaving and picking up
their children at daycare as the most problematic and
challenging parts of the day (Eldèn and Anving,
2016). Stress related to the ‘doing’ of care loops is
among the top priorities on their list of what they
want to avoid when hiring an au pair.
Kindergartens’ expectations to parental involve-
ment in children’s social activities can be easier to
meet for wealthy families than for lone-mothers
(Bach, 2014) or stressful for parents being insecure if
they are gender equal ‘enough’ (Smeby and Brandth,
2013). The two lone-mothers in our study support kin-
dergartens’ educational purposes, and prefer to pay an
au pair to get help to bring and pick up children from
childcare. Mothers in dual-earner families take on the
extra burden to organize and administrate the au pair’s
housework, and prefer to do most of the childcare
themselves. In research focusing on the relative con-
tribution of men in domestic tasks, a main finding is
that sharing childcare is more important for gender
equality–oriented couples than splitting the house-
work (Neyer et al., 2013).
Nearly all children between the ages of 1 and
5 years are enrolled in a kindergarten. As in Slovenia
(see Hrzenjak in this volume) and other Scandinavian
welfare societies (see Eldèn and Anving and Näre
and Wide in this volume), public childcare has
become a normal and expected part of a modern
childhood. Public funding for early childhood edu-
cation has significantly increased over the past
15 years, enabling a fast expansion of this sector. The
driving force behind this policy is the expectation of
‘double dividend’ outcome: an inclusion of all chil-
dren in lifelong learning to support social, cognitive
and psychological equalization and new norms for
gender egalitarian family life.
Egalitarian ideologies on the
move
The empirical studies that we base our discussion on
indicate that families who employ au pairs do have
egalitarian ideals as seen in the mothers’ aspirations to
work full-time and their support for public childcare.
However, when hiring au pairs to reduce the stress of
everyday life, these same mothers contribute to social
inequalities among children as their children can
enjoy quality time with parents and avoid stressful
mornings and afternoons. Paradoxically, the combina-
tion of local and global care practised by au pair–fam-
ilies is a response to their drive to succeed in
establishing egalitarian family practices.
Studies of Norwegian families’ use of paid house-
hold services show that men, more often than women,
take the initiative to pay for such services so that they
do not need to do the cleaning themselves (Isaksen,
2010). Due to national traditions for public care,
domestic services are predominately associated with
cleaning and not care work. Nine percent of families
with small children (0–6 years) buy cleaning services
(Kitterød, 2012). Sixty percent of employed cleaners
are female, and 80 percent of them are migrants,
mostly from Eastern Europe (Trygstad et al., 2018).
For mothers, on the contrary, getting help with all the
‘patchwork of care’ enables them to work full-time
even when husbands are commuting or the opening
hours of the daycare are short. In host families, au pairs
do more housework than childcare. For modern fami-
lies, an equal sharing of childcare is more important
than an equal share of housework (Neyer et al., 2013).
Parents who aim to share housework equally report
having daily emotional tensions related to trivial mat-
ters such as breadcrumbs in the kitchen and not
remembering to bring warm clothes to childcare
(Aarseth, 2010). Existing research has not focused on
the extra workload that comes with care loops. The
work that generates tensions and stress has been an
invisible part of women’s care work. The increasing
demands for migrant care workers contribute to mak-
ing the workload of women’s work more visible, par-
ticularly because the employment of Filipina au pairs
has been a contested issue and caused heated debates
in public media discourses. Politicians have so far
insisted on presenting the au pair scheme as a ‘cultural
exchange’ programme even if research reports, TV
documentaries and public debates increasingly see au
pair migration through the eyes of au pairs themselves,
as economic migration. Analysis of media discourses,
political documents and parliament debates on au pairs
finds that political authorities work to protect Norway’s

Isaksen and Bikova 637
national identity as a gender egalitarian nation
(Annfelt, 2015). A social and political acceptance of
migrant women being cheap labour in private house-
holds would disturb an established image of gender
equality as successfully implemented politics.
John Urry starts his discussion of ‘mobilities’
with Simmel’s question: ‘How do people connect
places and subjectivity in their minds?’ (Urry, 2007:
20). Simmel points out, ‘No matter how often people
have gone backwards and forwards between the
places and “subjectively” connected them in their
mind’, it is he says: ‘only in visibly impressing the
path into the surface of earth that the places were
objectively connected’ (Simmel, 1997: 171, italics
added). Through the doing of care loops, parents
transform egalitarian ideas to objective and material
social practices and produce new social paths ‘into
the surface of the earth’. The work of hands and
minds builds the material and social structure upon
which the ‘double dividend’ policy rests.
Using care loops as a sensitizing concept in the
studies of families who employ au pairs, we shed light
on ignored and undervalued parts of care work in
Norwegian egalitarian contexts. Everyday logistics in
homes has been taken for granted and reflects the fact
that much of the women’s patchwork of mobility-
related care has in fact been invisible and undertheo-
rized. Turning the macroeconomic concept ‘double
dividend’ upside down, and exploring from below
how families ‘do’ care loops to connect home, work
and childcare, we find that women take on the lion’s
share of the work that needs to be done in order to
realize gender egalitarian norms and social equality
ideals. Parents from affluent social groups support
universal kindergarten’s egalitarian purposes, and
emphasize the importance of children making friends
and developing social capabilities. Conforming to
social and pedagogical ideals and expectations, par-
ents want their children to benefit socially from child-
care and focus less on human capital discourses.
Parents and especially mothers invest a lot of
work in care loops and proper interactions with staff
and other children and parents (Smeby and Brandth,
2013). The responsibility for the everyday logistics
in households is more than any other part of house-
and care-work coded female (Hudson and Rønnblom,
2012). Employing Filipina au pairs to help doing
daily care loops generates new work tasks and new
responsibilities to everyday life and to parents’ nego-
tiations of how to share housework equally.
Families in Norway support and use universal
care services because it has become an expected
social practice. Few families raise their children at
home. To make it possible for children to learn how
to make friends and play with other children, they
have to attend a kindergarten. In this sense, modern
childhoods have become multi-local and mobile.
Daily care loops in contemporary Norway are
established social paths and movements aimed to
support children’s social inclusion and ‘do’ gender
equality. A growing number of families employ
migrant care workers to get a helping hand to do
patchworks of care. This is a new geopolitical aspect
that has gendered, ethnic and class dimensions. In
many European contexts, reconciling work and fam-
ily is done by outsourcing care work to migrant
women (Lutz, 2011). In Norway, families outsource
work related to care loops and housework to au pairs,
but prefer to do childcare themselves.
The new social path created by families’ care
loops aimed to support egalitarian ideals challenges
the boundaries between the local and the global, and
between local egalitarian norms and transnational
social inequalities. ‘Double dividend’ policies, as
pointed out by Esping-Andersen (2015), relate to
national inequalities and have the nation-state as a
frame for equality measurement. Excluded from this
frame is the care work, tensions and stress parents
experience when struggling with individual replace-
ments of old norms with new gender symmetric
practices. We observe that care loops and the work-
loads that come with this mobility have become a
part of the housework which families outsource to
Filipina au pairs.
Being migrant care workers in the global econ-
omy, au pairs are included in larger processes of
transnational social inequalities. Doing unskilled
work in Norwegian households when being middle-
class and educated women themselves is an expres-
sion of a simultaneous decrease and increase of social
status which is conceptualized as ‘contradictory class
mobility’ by Parrenas (2001). In the Philippines,
many au pairs are middle-class actors in upwardly
mobile positions. Some even employ domestic

638 Journal of European Social Policy 29(5)
servants themselves in their home contexts. However,
when in Norway, the social status and marginal posi-
tions as live-in nannies doing housework for middle-
class families fits the stereotyped domestic servant
role. Although they earn more money, the social sta-
tus drops due to racialization based on gender, ethnic-
ity and nationality.
In Norway, the au pairs’ care work enhances the
employing family’s quality of life as it enables par-
ents to spend social and emotional quality time with
their children.
For migrants, access to emotional contact and
physical intimacy can be limited. For some migrant
workers, the contact with family members is reduced
to digital connectivity and temporary visits. This is
what Lutz (2018) claims are the emerging emotional
and care inequalities of transnational care giving.
This study reveals that mothers remain the main
providers of childcare and housework even in gender
equality–oriented families. It might be that contem-
porary families have entered a phase of normative
confusion and conflicting expectations of partner-
ships and family life. In a time when gender ideolo-
gies are on the move, it is an interesting paradox that
employment of Filipina au pairs for many parents
have become a prerequisite for what is perceived as
a successful integration in an equality-oriented soci-
ety as Norway.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Note
1. The studies presented in this section have been
conducted as a part of Bikova’s MA degree and
PhD degree at the Department of Sociology at the
University of Bergen. All the empirical data for the
two studies have been collected by Bikova alone.
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