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Epilogue: Scandinavian policies of parenthood – a success story?
Abstract
What is to be done about prostitution? Is it work or is it violence? Are women involved in it offenders or victims? Is it a private or a political issue? The answers to these questions depend on many factors, including where you live. This book provides a close comparison of the laws, policies and interventions in countries across Europe and Asia.
... In 1978, Norway passed probably the world's first gender-equality act. 1 The law was especially innovative in its combination of prohibiting gender-based discrimination and laying out positive duties and action to promote gender equality. Work-family policies in Norway, as in other Nordic countries, are built on the dual-worker/dual-carer family model (Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006;Ellingsaeter, 2014). Key to promoting gender equality is the right to job-protected, generously compensated leave for both parents after child birth and publicly subsidized, high-quality childcare (Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006), including a quota for fathers in the parental-leave scheme (Brandth and Kvande, 2013). ...
... Work-family policies in Norway, as in other Nordic countries, are built on the dual-worker/dual-carer family model (Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006;Ellingsaeter, 2014). Key to promoting gender equality is the right to job-protected, generously compensated leave for both parents after child birth and publicly subsidized, high-quality childcare (Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006), including a quota for fathers in the parental-leave scheme (Brandth and Kvande, 2013). Norway long had unmet daycare demand, especially for the youngest children, but today, the vast majority of children younger than school age attend kindergarten (Ellingsaeter et al., 2016). ...
... Since the Second World War, Swedish family politics has been driven by two overarching ideas: social equality and, at a later stage, gender equality (Esping-Andersen, 2016;Lundqvist, 2011). The first aimed at creating equal opportunities and good care situations for all children, through reforms such as universal child care allowances and an extensive and affordable-for-all public day-care system, and the second questioned the male breadwinner model and promoted dual-earner/dual-carer families, e.g., through 'daddy quotas' on parental leave (Ellingsaeter & Leira, 2006). Despite progressive politics and policies, there are still discrepancies between the strong political rhetoric of gender equality and family practices (Statistics Sweden, 2020). ...
Political initiatives such as tax deductions for domestic services including nannies have, together with a growing au pair market, paved the way for new possibilities of organizing child care and parenting in Sweden. This affects everyday ‘local care loops’ for the upper-middle-class families purchasing the services, as the logistics of solving the work-family dilemma change with the possibility of hiring cheap female—and often migrant—care workers (Näre & Isaksen 2019). In this chapter, we analyse how this affects the doing of family in ‘nanny families’. Taking our point of departure in a qualitative study with nannies and au pairs ( n = 26), parents ( n = 29), and children receiving care ( n = 19) (Eldén and Anving 2019), we show how everyday care is experienced and understood from the perspective of different actors involved in the practice, with a special focus on ideas of ‘quality time’. We argue that the new possibilities of organizing care and time in families reproduce inequalities: the new local care loops enable the possibility for some—well-off—parents to realize ideals of ‘good and stress-free parenting’, with quality time with their children, while at the same time not giving up on the idea of gender equality.
... Since the Second World War, Swedish family politics has been driven by two overarching ideas: social equality and, at a later stage, gender equality (Esping- Andersen, 2016;Lundqvist, 2011). The first aimed at creating equal opportunities and good care situations for all children, through reforms such as universal child care allowances and an extensive and affordable-for-all public day-care system, and the second questioned the male breadwinner model and promoted dual-earner/dual-carer families, e.g., through 'daddy quotas' on parental leave (Ellingsaeter & Leira, 2006). Despite progressive politics and policies, there are still discrepancies between the strong political rhetoric of gender equality and family practices (Statistics Sweden, 2020). ...
This chapter focuses on a new phenomenon, when small villages take school-aged children into foster care against the background of social and educational policies. First, the child welfare system has undergone deinstitutionalization; therefore, social policies actively stimulated an increase in the number of foster families: the percentage of children placed in foster care, from 2005 to 2015, increased from 2 to 24%. Second, educational reforms were introduced to close schools with a decreasing number of students. For rural schools, this initiative meant shutdown because up to 60% of the schools were underutilized. Some rural communities resisted transforming welfare state and protected their underutilized local schools from shutdown by taking into foster care large number of (pre)school-aged children. Today, there are rural schools where up to 90% of pupils are children admitted into foster care. I argue that transition from institutional care to a family one allows the state to reduce social spending and allows rural communities to outsource the underutilized schools to rural family. These families rely heavily on family resources as household production, gender practices, and intergenerational and intragenerational relations in their rural community to design their care loops. Qualitative data collection is based on 88 individual semi-structured interviews.KeywordsFoster familyDeinstitutionalizationUnderutilized schoolsLocal care loopsRussia
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