{"id":11236,"date":"2010-09-23T09:25:58","date_gmt":"2010-09-23T16:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11236"},"modified":"2010-09-23T09:25:58","modified_gmt":"2010-09-23T16:25:58","slug":"18-months-in-swedish-daddyland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11236","title":{"rendered":"18 Months In Swedish Daddyland"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Crossposted on Family Scholars Blog<\/a>, Alas<\/a>, and TADA.]<\/em><\/p>\n

In Slate<\/a>, an American father living in Sweden discusses family leave time for fathers.<\/p>\n

If you had asked me in, say, 2001, if I would ever take a long paternity leave, I would have answered, “Yeah, sure,” because I was a liberal guy \u2014 but then ignored my own answer because I was also an ambitious, career-driven type. Then I married a Swede, and we moved to a small town outside New York City that was close to no family or friends. Out of necessity, and my wife’s Swedish expectations, I got deeply involved in our upcoming baby’s life, though probably still no more than many American dads-to-be. We had a rough ride. My wife had bad doctors and a bad back, and we lived in a house covered with lead paint and infested with bats, rats, and bedbugs. It all began to seem overwhelming. In the end, almost more than my wife, I pushed for the move to Sweden, to the promise of parental leave, shorter work days, five weeks of vacation, and unlimited paid sick days if your kid falls ill.[…]<\/p>\n

Over the past 15 years, the streets of Stockholm have filled up with men pushing strollers. In 1995, dads took only 6 percent of Sweden’s allotted 480 days of parental leave per child. Then the Swedish government set aside 30 leave days for fathers only. In 2002 the state doubled the “daddy only” days to 60 and later added an “equality bonus” for couples that split their leave. Now more than 80 percent of fathers take some leave, adding up to almost a quarter of all leave days. So in the middle of, say, a Monday afternoon in March, the daddies and their strollers come at you both singly and in waves, the men usually either striding fast and stone-faced or pushing the stroller nonchalantly with one hand, cellphone glued to their ear. […]<\/p>\n

In my part of greater Stockholm, these dads are often on their way to the open preschools, especially through the dreary Swedish winter. These are municipal-run play-places, complete with cheap coffee, helpful teachers, and lots of balls and blocks. […] The dads act exactly like the moms. They talk about poop, whether their babies sleep, how tired they are, when their kid started crawling or walking or throwing a ball or whatever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the US, although we talk a lot about the need to attach fathers to their children, there’s not much interest in providing direct Governmental support for fatherhood. That’s probably to our detriment. It seems plausible that fathers who spend a lot of time raising their infants and toddlers will have a stronger connection to their children.<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, about 60% of Swedish teens live in a household with two biological parents (pdf link<\/a>), compared to about 50% of American teens<\/a>. That 50% figure is from 1999; I suspect a more recent figure would be a little higher. I haven’t found comparable children-living-with-single-father stats for the two countries, alas.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Crossposted on Family Scholars Blog, Alas, and TADA.] In Slate, an American father living in Sweden discusses family leave time for fathers. If you had asked me in, say, 2001, if I would ever take a long paternity leave, I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-families-structures-divorce-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}