Sara Eldén’s research while affiliated with Malmö University and other places

Grandparents’ involvement in their adult children’s families has increased in recent decades, especially in relation to care arrangements around grandchildren. This ‘new army of proxy parents’ calls for the need to critically analyse grandparental care. Drawing on a study on intergenerational care in Sweden, involving grandparents, adult children and grandchildren (63 interviewees including 28 grandparents), we suggest the concept of intensive grandparenting as an analytical lens for understanding contemporary grandparental involvement in care for grandchildren. Intensive grandparenting is done in a complex and ambivalent relation to parenting, making grandparents ‘proxy parents’ that help realise intensive parenting ideals, while also realising ‘good grandparenting’ ideals through adding a ‘golden touch’ to grandparent–grandchild relations. This growing involvement of grandparents, while highly appreciated, risks reproducing gendered and classed inequalities within and between families.

While the role of grandparents has increasingly been explored, the position of being a grandchild is under-researched. Recognising the active role of children in intergenerational care relationships, we analyse narratives of being a grandchild in Sweden in the 1940s–1950s, the 1970s–1980s, and today. Interviews with 63 participants of both genders show how conditions for care-doings change in response to welfare state developments and in relation to new ideals of childhood. Intensified engagements by grandparents in the life of grandchildren are identified, but also continuity in the significance of close and reciprocal relationships between grandchildren and grandparents.

The artide "Missing female subjects. An analysis of medical texts about menopause" focuses on medical discourses about women and middle age. More concretely, it presents an analysis of artides in Läkartidningen from 1990 through 2001. Läkartidningen is the official journal of the Swedish Medical Association and has a distribution of nearly 30 000 copies. The analysis is based upon three qualitative methods. We begin with a combination of content analysis and narrative analysis - focusing on what is being said and how it is being said - and continue with discourse analysis - focusing on what is being constructed. What we discovered is that the commonly used term 'middle age' is here re-defined as menopause, and menopause is represented through a particular narrative where loss of fertility is followed by descriptions of problems and symptoms and where the medical profession offers solutions - foremost amongst these is the use of hormone treatment. At a discursive level, women are represented not as women but as "woman" - a body. This body is seen as a fixed, biological category which can be studied independently of how any woman would define herself and independently of how women may experience and reflect on their lives and their bodies. Women as active subjects embedded in complex social relations are made invisible in these texts, as are differences between women. This article is part of a larger research project "Middle-aged bodies and gendered identities", financed by the Swedish Science Council. Theoretically, the project aims at contributing to a further understanding about the interlinkage of biological, social and cultural aspects in (discourses on) middle age, identity and the body. Empirically, it makes use of different sources: medical and literary texts, populär scientific texts, as well as interviews with middle aged women and men and with medical doctors.

Ludwig Eleven-year-old Ludwig has just experienced the leaving of his first au pair. For almost a year, Linda, an au pair from the Philippines, had been working in the family, taking care of Ludwig and his siblings. Ludwig’s memory of Linda is very bright, he really enjoyed her presence in his life and in the house, and especially her company in the afternoons: knowing that she would be there waiting for him when he got home from school made him feel safe and happy. In his draw-your-day painting, he chooses to draw that particular moment: himself and the au pair in the kitchen in the afternoon, when she is preparing his afternoon snack. Having Linda there was so “clever”, he says, “You had someone there who helped you. You were not alone when you got home. It was so good that someone was there”. If something was bothering him, for example, if he was upset about something when he got home from school, Ludwig felt that he could talk to her. Ludwig also talks about all the other things Linda did in the house for him and his family: she cleaned the house; she cooked all the food; she took his smaller siblings to activities; she sometimes tucked his baby sister in, in the evening; and she also – though not very often – played with him and his siblings. He talks about one time in particular when Linda helped them build a den by the family pool. She helped them drag out mattresses, sheets and pillows, and then they all hid in there, playing a trick on his mum when she got back home from work. ‘You could say that she was with us and helped us. She kind of, you could say that, she pushed us forward a bit so we could do more things, so things went faster and kind of.… So we simply could, they [parents] could work more and we could kind of, we were not home alone and.… So that was really good.’ Ludwig is both positive towards the idea of au pairing, and also expresses clearly that he had a very special relationship to Linda.

Nannies and au pairs in Swedish families? Really? The initial reaction when we began our research study some years ago was often surprise. One might have heard of Swedish girls going to the UK or US, or maybe France, in the gap year between high school and university, but who comes to work as an au pair in Sweden? Are there nannies in Sweden? Are not all Swedish children taken care of by publicly funded daycare centres? Indeed, signs of there being nannies and au pairs employed by Swedish families had occurred earlier. In the beginning of the 21st century, a number of scandals unfolded in the Swedish media regarding the use of domestic care workers in certain high-profile well-off families, testifying to the actual prevalence of these groups. In 2006, the media reported that two women MPs in the newly elected Conservative–Liberal government had hired several domestic workers over the years, including nannies and au pairs, all undeclared and at very low pay. The Conservative Party leader, Fredrik Reinfeldt, soon to be prime minister, had also hired au pairs, it was reported. The scandal – which included the testimonies of former nannies and au pairs about harsh conditions of working in ‘posh’ families in upper-class areas – led to the MPs resigning from their positions, less than two weeks after their commencement. Fredrik Reinfeldt's use of au pairs, however, was found to be within the rules of the Migration Agency and of no liability to him becoming prime minister. A couple of months later, in the beginning of 2007, this newly elected government presented their first reforms. One of them was a tax deduction for domestic services, such as those provided by cleaners and nannies. The problem, according to the government, was clearly not the use of the services, as such, but rather that they were too expensive. This was the reason why people turned to the informal market if they wanted to employ cleaners, nannies and au pairs, just as the two fired MPs had done. By making the informal market formal, it was argued, several problems could be solved (Bill 2006/07 no. 94). Work opportunities for the unemployed could be created, thought to be especially suitable for migrants and other groups having a hard time getting into the labour market.

Filippa Filippa comes rushing into the coffee shop where we have agreed to meet for the interview. She is straight out of a meeting, and she immediately starts talking about her work as a chief executive officer for a large agency and her special interest in helping women in business pursue a career. “I’m a feminist careerist”, Filippa says. This also reflects back on Filippa’s own everyday life. Gender equality is very important to Filippa, a mother of four children between the ages of five and ten years. However, while her husband has always supported her choices to pursue a demanding career, he has completely failed to do his part of the care and housework at home, she says. To solve the ‘jigsaw puzzle of life’, that is, to make the everyday life of managing a home, a family and a job possible, Filippa has hired help. Since their second child was born, Filippa has employed almost ten nannies, and she has recently also started to employ au pairs. This has been an absolute necessity, she says: “My husband works, and if I’m away, I have to cover for my absence somehow. He has said that explicitly, that he can only consider picking up the children from school and daycare once a week. There is no room for more in his schedule”. Hiring nannies and au pairs has not only been a way for Filippa to get through the everyday, it also has symbolic significance. She compares herself with her male colleagues who are married to women who work part time, or even, in a few cases, to housewives. “I also want a wife”, she says jokingly, and then adds on a more serious note: “I want to show my daughters, I want to show my son too, that a mother isn’t just someone who serves others, who stays at home”. For Filippa, being a good parent is being present and engaged, and she sees herself as someone who always puts her children first. However, that does not necessarily mean that she always needs to be present in person. To be a good parent, you need to make sure that you are content and satisfied with your own life, she says, and that could sometimes mean not doing everything together with your children.

Using Sweden as a case study, this book combines theories of family practices, care and childhood studies with the personal perspectives of nannies, au pairs, parents and children to provide new understandings of what constitutes care in nanny families.

Care is at the centre of what we have described in the past three chapters: it is what parents expect nannies and au pairs to do when they hire them, and it is what nannies and au pairs see as the core part of their responsibility in the family. It is also what children expect of nannies and au pairs – that they should take care of them. However, at the same time, care is far from simple to put down in words; as DeVault (1991: 4) says, it is an activity that we ‘know from experience but cannot easily label’, an ‘activity without a name, activity traditionally assigned to women, often carried out in family groups’, although, in this case, the women are not ‘really’ part of the family group, nor are they completely outside. Despite the intangible character of care, this chapter sets out to zoom in on it specifically. Drawing on and bringing together the narratives from the previous chapters, in the following, we will identify some key features in the care situation that children, nannies and au pairs find themselves in when doing care. We will also discuss how this situation corresponds with and diverges from the expectations of this care situation, formulated in ideals of the practice as an ‘easy job’. This, then, finally, brings us to a discussion of invisibility: of what is obscured in the gap that emerges between the experience of an actual practice and the expectations of this practice. While all care doings can be argued to entail invisible doings, the care doings of nannies and au pairs are invisible in specific ways, and on many levels, simultaneously. Understanding this is crucial for understanding the particular precarity of this practice. “It's the children who spend time with the nanny; the parents just employ her so they can be at work”: the care situation according to children In the preceding quote, 12-year-old Karl is pointing out the obvious: nannies and au pairs are hired to care for children, so they naturally spend time together. When Karl chooses to put emphasis on this in his interview, he is arguing for his right as a child to give his opinion and to talk about his experience of having nannies and au pairs: children, not parents, spend time with nannies and au pairs; thus, children are experts on this subject, in Karl's mind.

Gloria The first time we meet with Gloria, a 20-year-old au pair from the US, she is bubbly and talkative and has a very positive attitude towards almost everything, especially so towards her Swedish host family. At this point, Gloria had spent two months in the family, and she immediately starts talking about how much she loves her work, how she likes spending time outdoors with the children and how she and the host mother sometimes go shopping together. It was an instant match, she says; when they spoke on Skype before she came, she says that she could already “tell they were just warm and friendly”. Gloria arrived in Sweden on a Sunday afternoon, got introduced to the work by the mother on the following Monday and then started to work – on her own – on the Tuesday. Her working tasks include taking care of the family's three children and doing household chores. Both her host mother and her host father work full time and are really busy, she tells the interviewer; in fact, thinking about it, she cannot understand how they managed before she arrived. In the morning Gloria gets the children ready for school and daycare and makes sure they get there in time. When she gets back again, she cleans up after breakfast, she makes the beds, and occasionally vacuums. After that she takes the dog for a walk and sometimes also goes grocery shopping. Twice a week, Gloria attends a Swedish-language school in town, paid for by the parents. Around 4.00 pm, she picks up the children, takes them to their different and plentiful after-school activities, such as tennis, horseback riding, music lessons and swimming classes, helps them with their homework, and sometimes also cooks dinner for the whole family In the evenings and on the weekends, she often spends time together with the family. Living in the house makes her “part of the family”, she says; her being there and being around means that the parents get some much-needed extra help, even if it is past her working hours. She does not mind helping out – “it just seems natural”, she says.