Why is Sweden paying grandparents to babysit?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Of course my sister paid my Mom to babysit the grandkids.
In Sweden parents get 16 months of parental leave, to be taken before the child is 12. You get paid, but not your full salary. https://www.forsakringskassan.se/english/parents/when-the-ch...
A few years ago the “left” politics were trying to encourage dads to take parental leave, as mothers taking it all was making the women in the workforce less equal. And if money was the carrot then making some of the dads entitlement non-transferable was the stick.
More recently the “right” is now in government and my gut reaction to hearing about this new change in policy is that it is probably trying to subtly reverse that? Seems likely.
(Which is a ratchet and arguably a mistake, but that's another topic.)
In Poland, there is proposed legislation (or did it pass already?) for the govt to pay for babysitters XOR babysitting grandparents. The idea is to allow parents to work. I imagine Sweden is going for the same thing.
The normal way to spend the 16 months is for the mother to take the first 6 months off after birth to care for the baby, and the father to take the next 6 months, and the child to go to a day playgroup after a year ish. And then the rest of the time is sometimes taken as one day a week for a while when the kid is older but before they start school. Lots of ways to vary it though)
What is the racket? No one is forcing two income families.
That people like to be financially independent and they like quality of life with two incomes rather than one is simply people’s preferences.
The only caveat to this is governments restricting the building of denser housing, but that has nothing to do with two income families.
I wrote ratchet, not racket, though arguably both fit.
> No one is forcing two income families.
Except for all the other dual-income families. That's the ratchet. Or, the magic of supply and demand at play.
In a society where single-income households are dominating, the households that choose to go dual-income suddenly have 2x the income (obviously), and effectively jump a rung higher on the socioeconomic ladder. As more and more households choose this way, there's a surplus of disposable income on the market, which reduces pressures holding prices of everything down, and additionally, creates new classes of products and services[0]. As the society transitions to predominantly dual-income households, the socioeconomic ladder readjusts - suddenly the single-income households can no longer afford to live the way they used to, as prices of everything went up (both nominally and through inflation), and there's more required spending. The ratchet has turned a step, and there is no going back.
Or in a hot take form: the option for women to choose career over being a homemaker started as a choice. But, as enough women took the career option, it now became a requirement. Decades ago, a woman could find a job. Nowadays, she has to, otherwise she's going to be economically disadvantaged, whether single or with a partner.
That's the ratchet. Or a bait-and-switch the market pulled on women. It's fine for couples who don't plan to start a family; sucks for those that do.
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[0] - In short: the market adjusts to keep average disposable income in a population at zero. More than zero means there's money left on the table, and someone will soon find a way to pick it up.
I guess what I am trying to say is there is no bait and switch, or trick, or other insidious plot. Women are heavily benefiting from financial independence, and society feels some of the costs.
More work and effort equals the ability to have more purchasing power is a fundamental part of capitalism. If we are so concerned that single income families are being priced out of sufficient quality of life, then we should be mandating overtime after 20 hours per week of work, instead of having one partner in a relationship becoming forced to depend on the other.
The ones who wanted to be financially independent, yes. The ones who wanted children, whether from young age or suddenly, as adults, they're screwed. It's not just society that's screwed - so are many of the women, because as I wrote earlier: there was a moment when they had a choice between career and homemaking, but that time is past.
> More work and effort equals the ability to have more purchasing power is a fundamental part of capitalism.
Capitalism has its failure modes, and this is one: the market adjusts to bring average disposable income to zero. If almost everyone puts in more work and effort at the same time, their purchasing power stays the same on average. More work, same results. A ratchet.
> If we are so concerned that single income families are being priced out of sufficient quality of life, then we should be mandating overtime after 20 hours per week of work, instead of having one partner in a relationship becoming forced to depend on the other.
Would be nice, but unless you set up a ceiling (which would be unfair for any number of reasons), then the market will nullify those efforts. As long as anyone can get ahead on the margin by putting some extra work or making some sacrifice, everyone will be pressured to do it.
(Or: race to the bottom doesn't only affect companies, and it doesn't stop being a race to the bottom just because "more work" sounds like something is increasing.)
The current fertility rate for Sweden in 2024 is 1.842 births per woman, a 0.05% decline from 2023.
The fertility rate for Sweden in 2023 was 1.843 births per woman, a 0.05% decline from 2022.
The fertility rate for Sweden in 2022 was 1.844 births per woman, a 0.11% decline from 2021.
The fertility rate for Sweden in 2021 was 1.846 births per woman, a 0.05% decline from 2020.
TFR of 1.8 is relatively healthy, but still sub-replacement, and the TFR of the native Swedish population is lower than that of the refugees.
So not that great a country to be a parent, perhaps. Nowhere is.
My mother was one of 8. That doesn't make rural Michigan in the 1950s a great place to be a parent. That means, as an aunt put it, that my grandparents didn't know about birth control.
The average age of childbirth has gone by ~10 years over the last 50 years.
So instead of having 22 yr old parents and 45 yr old grandparents.... you now have 32 yr old parents and 65 yr old grandparents.
A 45 yr old grandparent is an able-bodied helper. A 65 yr old is a dependent. This is doubly true once you realize that obesity rates are rising and having grandparents as guests in cities is getting prohibitively expensive.
Don't have a general-purpose solution at hand. All options feel horrible. But, we don't seem to be making much progress in aging....so grand parents will often find themselves needing to help when they need a lot of help themselves.
To individuals, I'd recommend prioritizing your health. If you avoid cancer, hip replacements, and heart disease, then you can easily live to your late 80s in good health. It is the greatest gift you can give yourself or your children. Attia is popular in these parts, maybe start there.
p.s : I am in a sermonizing mood after I realized how bad my cardio had gotten in a recent hike.
does this apply in Sweden?
Here, my half-baked intuition is the state takes on a paternalistic relationship with the individual. It undermines family & partners as the primary support system.
Sweden has very-high rates of single parenthood [1] and children outside wedlock [2]. If individuals place low importance on the family as a unit, then I do not see why baby-sitting would appeal to Grandparents (to derive joy or as a duty) In a way, being paid to babysit makes a pure relationship seem rather transactional.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/11581511/sha...
[2] https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Comparison-E...
I was babysat now and then by a 85 year old great-grandmother.
Rising parental age is a catastrophe, but not for this reason.
Meanwhile some of our friends with late 50s/low 60s parents are able to fully entrust their kid to one of the grandparents and go out for date nights/weekends. My wife and I are able to somewhat compensate for the lack of family help by throwing vast sums of money at the problem, but not many parents can do what we do.
Society messed up big time by allowing late parenthood to become the norm. It's really going to hurt future generations, but it's already making my generation shy away from having kids.
We also do this, but in our case the reason is further complicated by the fact that both of our mothers passed away some time ago, and so the kid has no grandmother. She just has two grandfathers, one still working and the other retired but incompetent at child rearing (never really did it with his own kids).
I wonder if cases like ours would have been easier (without money) in a tighter community. We live in a large apartment building in a big city. We live super close to our neighbors, and yet people barely even know each other. I imagine if this was a small village, people might know about our situation and be eager to pitch in (and of course we would do the same for others).
What are you even talking about? My mother's parents were 74 and 76 when I was born and they were routinely my caregivers several times a week (while my parents were working) until I was about 6, and occasionally after that. That wouldn't work in every family, but the idea that "a 65 yr old is a dependent" is utterly unfounded as a general rule.
They're either dependent, or able-bodied, or dead. Not sure what the relative percentages are, but I doubt that "able-bodied and healthy enough to provide ongoing childcare for grandkids" is the majority here.
Looking at my area (urban Poland) there's a matter of urbanization as well - plenty of parents in the cities are first-generation city dwellers; their parents live in the countryside. The logistics (and CoL in cities, as GP noted), makes involving grandparents on regular basis prohibitively expensive.
N=1 in my case, we have one grandmother in the city, still professionally active (so limited time), and two grandparents retired and self-supporting, but living far away in the countryside (so unable to help most of the time).
I think that your theory could be very easily tested with simple survey methods. Find grandparents, ask their age, and ask if they regularly care for their grandchildren. It doesn't really matter the age of their own children because we can basically infer it with the grandchildren being under 12.
Such a survey could be improved by asking people their country. My anecdotal observation is that German grandparents provide much more childcare than their American counterparts, despite comparable generational gaps. Another anecdotal observation is the Filipino grandparents also provide more childcare with a smaller generational gap.
A fourth useful question might be to ask why grandparents are raising kids. I speculate that in rich countries, it is because they want to, but in poor countries, it is because the 20/30-somethings are financially providing for both the children and the grandparents.
Most people eat worse and exercise less than the previous generation. A small visible minority do a lot more, but that doesn't speak to the health of the average individual.
New GLP-1 agonists might medicate us into good health. But somehow, I am sceptical that it is going to be that simple.
The tarbaby behind this is there's a direct correlation between women's education and age of childbirth, and inverse with fertility rate. This crosses cultures and isn't Western-exclusive. The fallout is also the impetus for replacement migration policies, lest the debt-entitlement schemes fail.
takes cover
And every boomer who championed this braindead idea will get EXACTLY what is coming to them. It will be glorious and I will absolutely laugh and mock them.
Nuclear families are, by definition, two-generation; 3-generation families are one of the more common things that nuclear families are defined in opposition to.
that may be true for some, but others I have seen are highly capable at that age still. And of course in the US we have two octogenarians running to be presidents.
Having grandparents at 45 means they are still at peak earning capacity, and likely earning more than their 22 year old kids, so it wouldn’t make economic sense for 45 year olds to take time off.
Also I'm pretty sure that modern Swedes have more in common to modern North Koreans than either do to the Vikings. They lived in such different times and cultures that I don't really think it makes sense to compare them. Maybe you could ask how cold dark winters affected Vikings and how they affect modern Swedes, but even then the winters were much harder for Swedes 100 years back than they are today when the country is much richer. So really the inhabitants 1000 years back might as well be considered aliens compared to the Swedes of today.
The immediately obvious factors to me that would all strongly influence this would include: How many commitments they really have (this might include work, volunteering, friend groups); How much time & energy they already spend caring for someone else (particularly their partner); How much energy/general impact of their physical health - e.g. is it easy for them to move around and chase kids; The age at which the grandparents and parents both had kids will heavily impact all of the above (Quick scan/aggregate of Google images graphs for this suggests this has risen about 5-7 years total steadily since about 1975. We'd now now be seeing the impact of this adding up from both generations pushing the age of grandparents quite a bit older on average); What the family relationship is like in both directions; How much that person enjoys or more specifically doesn't enjoy kids in general; How much free money they have to spend on the care; Travel time to/from
Speaking from an Australian perspective about your specific example though, once a week seems like a lot of time, especially to make an exacting persistent commitment rather than organising it on a more ad-hoc basis.
We have an absolutely amazing relationship with my wife's parents. As an estimate, they probably end up helping out for at least part of a day in most fortnights and easily 1-2 full days every month, with some months easily double that.
I don't think I'd ask for a persistent once a week. That said, we also have government subsidised child-care and it's affordable for us so we don't really have a need for the regularly scheduled work-days.. our needs are the ad-hoc times that doesn't cover like appointments, school commitments, a random extra work day, school holidays, a date night/concert/party/dinner, etc.
I work full time (but from home, so I get to see my kids when home at least a little), my wife works 3 days (only 2 for our first child) so we also have been happy having them in daycare for only 2-3 days a week.. we are both very keen NOT to have them in daycare every weekday until school age and fortunately are in the situation to be able to do so. If we weren't, the desire for more regular grandparent care over daycare would probably be higher, purely for not having them in a rigid external environment 5 days a week.
But it would not surprise me if once a week or more was normal in some cultures or places. I know some definitely lean more heavily on the family unit than others, and some are also more likely to live in multi-generational houses which would likely lend to making that more likely - no one really has to go anywhere.
Some actual data from Australia showing 21-32% of grandparents provided care about once a week or more: https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-snapshots/grandparents...
There is plenty more research and numbers on all of these things for many countries readily findable.
I'm in my early/mid 40s now; if I'd had kids in my early 20s I suppose they'd be college-age now, and I'd just be getting back to a more-or-less child-free social life. (Granted, that would depend on all my friends also having done the same thing.)
But I don't have kids at all, and, frankly, I don't have the energy to do much of the stuff I did 10 years ago. If I'd spent the last ~20 years raising kids I imagine I'd have even less energy than I do now.
But at the same time I can't imagine having a newborn now, or even in the past 5 years or so. That sounds beyond exhausting, and I'm not sure I'd be able to do it.
Of the people in this age range that I know, the more well-off they are the more likely they are currently married and having kids. Those that aren't well-off are not enjoying a lifestyle because they can't afford that either.
It gets better by the time they’re 2-3 and can walk, but of course other childcare options become more available at that point as well.
All their ideas about how to bring up children are completely outdated by modern standards, so it's just constant fighting over how things should be done, so we don't even bother getting them involved.
Within my circles, especially my girl friends, are having one child around mid-30s as they don’t want to give up on their careers. Even worse to be completely depended on their partners as that gives them less choices in life. Cannot blame them, it’s easy for me to want a child, but imagining to go through 3 pregnancies (basically to increase the population) in their 20s is giving up on everything that everyone else gets to do at that age.
One day you will lose your biological faculties and then some day soon after you will die. Caveat emptor, and plan accordingly.
I wonder why people like Elon Musk and JD Vance often bring up Orban's Hungary and Putin's Russia as examples of countries that are successfully increasing birthrates when Denmark, Sweden, and Czechia have higher (native born) birthrates than both Hungary and Russia.
Denmark 1.6 Czechia 1.6 Sweden 1.5 Hungary 1.5 Russia 1.4
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?end=2022...
Pretty hard IMO to say much about the relative effect these policies are having at all, especially if you throw in other countries like Norway (1.4) and Finland (1.3).
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/...
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
An extinction in Europe is still an extinction.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/04/04/china-sees-first-po...
Aztecs became the Nahua people in Mexico, there are millions of them so not extinct.
I'm not well versed in Celtic people but I guess it's the same as the Goths and Aztecs, their descendants live today in Scotland/UK/Ireland/wherever they moved.
Up gets steeper and steeper until something happens. We probably don't want to find out what. The way down has a very long tail.
Japan's population at this rate will decline to 50 million over a 100 years. A lot can happen in 100 years. And it's not clear that the current trend will continue.
I'm sure people on the tip top of the wealth/population pyramid are freaking out that the thing will start getting smaller. I'm dubious there is a net negative for the people on the bottom. Right now rents have been gamed up, labor power is weak. A falling population will reverse that.
So they picked something/someone to blame and then figured out what to blame them for.
> countering the declining birthrates in Denmark and Sweden
Both Denmark and Sweden have been plummeting nonstop for a decade+ now, how is it possible to interpret that as a success in countering decline?
https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/borgere/befolkning/fer...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
> often bring up
I learned about JD Vance's existence yesterday (not really into politics) so i'm not going to defend whatever he said or didn't, but nobody in their right mind would set a country population size of Chicago (pretty much all of those above) as a demographic example to US-scale problems, if that's what is being referred to here. Perhaps something was mentioned along the lines of "at least those countries have kids subsidies which are more meaningful to the local COL than whatever measly tax allowances we have here in the US" - that would actually be accurate - but whatever. In reality, not one of the mentioned countries managed to turn anything around yet, all are stuck well below replacement, mostly with pretty bleak trends.
> “Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children, and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them, and has them later.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...
> Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... | https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2
> South Korea spent more than $200 billion subsidizing child care and parental leave over the past 16 years, President Yoon Suk Yeol said last fall. Yet the fertility rate fell from 1.1 in 2006 to 0.81 in 2021.
> The amount of money required to trigger even these small effects is enormous. In "The Economic Consequences of Family Policies," published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2017, researchers found "one extra percentage point of GDP spending" on early childhood education and child care programs was "associated with 0.2 extra children per woman." In the U.S., where the 2022 GDP was $25.46 trillion, that would mean spending more than $250 billion.*
https://reason.com/2023/05/02/storks-dont-take-orders-from-t...
(TLDR There is no political nor societal will to reconfigure economic systems and workplaces, nor incur the economic drag through spending on benefits programs, that would be required to stop the fertility rate decline)
takes cover again
ADDENDUM: Also maybe encouraging an 11 girl : 9 boy birth ratio could help things, with better protections for fathers' rights to be more than the responsible payer post-divorce (and maybe just stop forcibly collecting support altogether from those men making less than median and who the woman left no-fault).
But the fact is also that a ton of people just can’t plan that far ahead. Not too sure what to do about that.
JD Vance and Elon Musk has absolutely zero to do with Swedish child care.
Because they love the idea of individual power and totalitarianism.
Elon has time and again shown himself to be hypocrite-supreme. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Instead, the child is playing alone in the room while the family eats their dinner.
Keep in mind that this is not judgement, just a window into how different Swedish culture can sometimes be.
Because after that reddit post I asked all of my Swedish friends who are parents, none of them said it'd be normal to not serve dinner to their kids playdates. And I don't think anyone said it's happened to them when they were kids either.
It is definitely not the norm, but it is definitely a wide spread phenomenon.
Or at least it used to be more prevalent, as my sampling has an age bias.
A quick duckduckgoing supports their claims:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/swedengate-sweden-dinne...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/world/europe/sweden-feedi...
https://www.thelocal.se/20220530/fact-check-do-swedish-paren...
>Today, a new survey from Ancestry, the leader in family history, found more than half (53%) of Americans can't name all four grandparents – demonstrating a knowledge gap in key information about more recent family history.
I think I didn't really know my maternal grandparents' names until they died and I looked at a family tree. My paternal grandfather's name isn't even well-defined: it's been butchered after 4 civil wars & invasions, 2 emigrations, different dialects, repeated anglicizations, and a change in the orthography of his native language.
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[0] - Anna vs. Hanna. Close enough to be ambiguous in speech.
A lament perhaps.
My other grand parents come once a week to hang out with the kids, nanny is off that day. I beg them to take the kids to the zoo, the playground, the library, jumping jacks, a hike, a walk with the dogs. I am constantly disappointed by a grandpa on his phone and a grandma that can’t do all that herself, and I’m stuck working so I can’t do it.
I think “the decline of marriage” or “broken homes” is a symptom. If you’re an American who frequents this board, you’re in some of the roughest late stage capitalism effects on your personal relationships and community relationships that could exist until we see the Wall-e universe.
Not having a multi-generational family to help raise the kids in your neighborhood to help ameliorate the cost and stress of raising kids puts a huge strain on a marriage. Having to work 60-70 hours a week to make life possible to have those kids, with daycare and preschool and all the other costs… it’s a self fulfilling cycle.
The 60s youth barely had 1 parent at home, my generation had none, if the parents weren’t even home why should the grand parents feel any responsibility to help right?
Anyway, something to think about when you’re just blaming “decline” (it’s actually gotten better) of marriage. Some stats:
Currently, the divorce rate per 1000 married women is 16.9.
The divorce rate per 1000 married women is nearly double that of 1960, but down from the all-time high of 22.6 in the early 1980s.
The divorce rate for couples with children is as much as 40 percent lower than for those without children.
An annual income of over $50,000 can decrease the risk of divorce by as much as 30% versus those with an income of under $25k.
Also the real answer to the question posed in the headline is that the most powerful voting blocks will naturally receive the highest subsidies in a democracy.
I wish more people, including voters but especially lawmakers, would use this analysis technique more often as it would lead to laws that actually accomplish what they claim.
So what if a small percent of old people (that presumably need the money so bad they they are willing to commit fraud)? Better that than gma stealing from local businesses.
The fraud should be a relatively small percent, as gparents should at least prove they have grandkids.