For decades, Sweden's innovations in family policy have inspired other countries in Europe to follow its lead. The Swedish approach, dubbed the "earner-carer model", has focused on getting men and women to share work and family responsibilities, facilitating the combination of relatively high levels of female employment and childbearing with low child poverty rates. Now recent reforms are changing the playing field. A scientific article by Tommy Ferrarini and Ann-Zofie Duvander argues that the reforms are likely to increase polarization in Swedish society.
Family policy legislation in Sweden has become a point of reference for foreign policy-makers, and reforms in other countries have occasionally been made with Swedish policies serving more or less as a blueprint. The German parental insurance law of 2007 is only one recent example.
However, recent Swedish reforms seem to pose a challenge to the established earner-carer model: As Ferrarini and Duvander show, these reforms are likely to increase polarization in Swedish society, with the danger of a widening divide between well-educated high earners and the less privileged, particularly members of ethnic minority groups, as especially regards child-rearing.
The new homecare allowance, for example, provides financial support for parents who choose to stay home to look after their young children as opposed to putting them into public child care. The allowance, the authors point out, tends to encourage certain groups of women to choose homemaking over working, particularly mothers from homes with a traditional division of labour, large earnings differentials, high unemployment, limited career prospects and low education. In Sweden, many of the households that fit that profile are comprised of ethnic minorities. Women who are high earners with high levels of education and good career prospects are unlikely to be affected by the homecare allowance to the same extent.
Other reforms are also likely to increase differences between the haves and the have-nots. A new childcare voucher, aimed at offering parents a wider range of childcare choices, compensates parents who take care of both their own and other children in their homes. The voucher is expected to be used mainly by women with limited alternative employment opportunities, particularly immigrants and women with lower levels of education who live in regions with high unemployment, thereby increasing differences between those groups and women with better career prospects. On the other hand, a generous tax deduction for household services such as childcare, cleaning and cooking, used mainly by high income households who benefit most from tax breaks, is also likely to increase polarization.
The authors conclude that the new reforms are likely to alter the logic of the Swedish family policy model in the long term, by decreasing levels of employment among women with the lowest levels of education and the weakest labour force attachment. Their children will benefit to a lesser extent from the pedagogical guidance of a preschool education, and will increasingly be confined to in-home care. In general, the researchers warn of the adverse effects on children in terms of higher risks for child poverty: This risk is likely to be particularly serious for immigrant children with lower educated parents, those who already have an enhanced risk of social exclusion.
This volume has been published with financial support of the European Union in the framework of Population Europe.