Taking Turns or Halving It All: Care Trajectories of Dual-Caring Couples

Abstract

Interview and observational studies document that dual-caring is characterized by temporality. Two ‘ideal-typical’ trajectories are identified: ‘halving it all’ in which couples divide care equally on a daily or weekly basis and ‘taking turns’ in which parents take month- or year-long turns in serving as primary caregivers to the child. This study utilizes a new source of couple-level longitudinal information on parental leave to investigate dual-caring trajectories in contemporary Sweden. Results show that while care trajectories in which only one parent serves as the primary caregiver can be captured without longitudinal information, the dominant dual-caring trajectory cannot. In fact, despite a uniquely flexible parental leave system that allows egalitarian couples to share care on a daily basis, most couples do not share care in every point in time, but ‘take turns’ in serving as the primary caregiver to the child, with the mother’s ‘turn’ preceding the father’s. The results demonstrate that cross-sectional and aggregate measures of child care may fail to detect emerging trends in dual-caring.

Household income and maternal education in early childhood and risk of overweight and obesity in late childhood: Findings from seven birth cohort studies in six high-income countries

“…Income is plausibly less strongly correlated with education in Sweden because parents with higher education, including fathers, tend to take longer parental leave. Relatedly, parental leave reduces income because the subsidized benefit only compensates a portion of the household salary and has an upper limit of compensation [ 33 ].…”

How long is a parental leave and for whom? An analysis of methodological and policy dimensions of leave length and division in Sweden

“…We start by acknowledging that gendered practices are still dominating the use of Swedish parental leave, not surprisingly but despite gender-neutral legislation. Eriksson (2019) for instance shows that it is very uncommon for fathers to take the first part of the IJSSP 482 40,5/6 leave and sharing mainly happen toward the end of the parental leave period. Official statistics tell us that women use over two-thirds of the benefit days, i.e.…”

“…Earlier studies show that the flexibility in leave use is prevalent among parents in Sweden. This leads to somewhat varying results from research relying on surveys, where parents refer to their memory of the actual leave length, while in population register studies only paid leave days are counted (Eriksson, 2019; Swedish Inspectorate for the Social Insurance, 2013). For example, while the registered paid benefit days for the first four years for children born in 2006 was 305 for mothers and 69 for fathers, survey results for the same time period indicate that mothers use approximately 14 months of leave, and fathers 1.7 months (Swedish Social Insurance Agency, 2012; Duvander, 2014).…”

Low maternal education increases the risk of Type 1 Diabetes, but not other autoimmune diseases: a mediating role of childhood BMI and exposure to serious life events

“…We have found in repeated studies that in the Swedish ABIS cohort, in contrast to other birth cohorts conducted in high-income countries, the association between health outcomes and income is weaker than the association with maternal education 42 – 44 . Income differences between families with children in early childhood is reduced in Sweden due to policies including the parental leave insurance that have an upper level of compensation and by the fact that high educated fathers take longer parental leave 43 , 45 . Our conclusion is that maternal education is the preferred measure of childhood SES in the Swedish context and better reflect the status or social position of parents than household income.…”