Dr. Charlotte Evlander on Paid Family Leave, Sweden
Dr. Charlotte Evlander, PhD, a care developer, midwife, and mother of four based in Stockholm, Sweden, shares her expertise in the culture around gender equality and parental roles in raising children. She also shares her personal experiences being married to an American and then to a Swede, and how the government, society, and cultural norms all play a role in a parent’s involvement in raising children.
Also featured is Dr. Darby Saxbe, PhD, from the University of Southern California, who shares her worldwide research on the benefits of paid family leave on new parents.
The first few months of the transition to motherhood, whether you’re a new or experienced mother, is a unique combination of extreme bliss and pure overwhelm. For many, the hardest part of new motherhood is when your partner or support person returns to work after the birth and you’re left to fend for yourself with your new baby - or your maternity leave is up and you’re returning to work, leaving your new baby for long stretches of time.
Paid family leave is a government-funded payment and job protection to exit and re-enter the workforce, to enable one or both parents to take time off before and after the birth of a new baby. In Sweden, paid family leave is an integral part of supporting both mothers and partners in their transition to the role of parents.
With over 480 days of paid family leave for both mothers and partners, Sweden is renowned for having one of the best family leave policies in the world.
SWEDEN’S PAID FAMILY LEAVE POLICY
Sweden’s paid family leave policy was originally created to provide the opportunity for both men and women to have time at work and time taking care of children, and the policy is constantly looking at ways to increase that equally-divided time off. Sweden's parental leave policy gives individual families the resources to make choices about employment and caregiving, and it challenges the inequality in which women are primarily responsible for the care of children (and leaving their jobs), while men take care of the economic needs of children (but not the caregiving).
Each parent is entitled to 240 of the 480 days of paid parental leave and has 90 days reserved exclusively for him or her. In 1974, Sweden became the first country in the world to introduce paid parental leave for fathers, changing the term from maternity leave to parental leave, and since then the policy has been continuously reformed to strengthen gender equality in the country. The parental leave policy uses gender-neutral language, providing support for same-sex parents as well as heterosexual ones.
Dr. Charlotte Evlander, a care developer, midwife, PhD, at BB Stockholm, midwifery clinics, delivery ward, specialist prenatal care and postpartum clinic which is located in Danderyd's Hospital in Stockholm shares her own experiences with family leave and the impact she sees on new parents as a midwife.
“It’s not just the government’s family leave policy, but the entire culture around gender equality and both partners playing an equal role in child raising duties that give women the choice in what they want to do with their careers and lives.”
Can you share a little background on yourself?
I’m a midwife and researcher based in Stockholm, Sweden. I work at BB Stockholm as a midwife and I conduct research to create and implement guidelines around birth on both regional and national levels.
In 2004, I worked as a nurse in the United States, where I met my first husband who was an American. When we knew we wanted to have children, we moved back to Sweden in 2006, our daughter was born in 2007 and we were divorced in 2008. I met my Swedish husband two years later and have three boys with him.
I’ve experienced both the American culture around parenthood and the contrast with the Swedish way of doing things. I saw two totally different ways of looking at how to be a parent, which opened my eyes to how completely different your parenthood experience can be based on what the system is telling you that you should do.
The big difference with my first American husband was that he wasn’t interested in staying home with the children. My second husband from Sweden, however, said of course I will stay home at least half of the time with our children. With him, there was no question about it. I had two children as a doctoral student, got my PhD, and had four children by the time I was 37 years old. This wouldn’t have been possible if I wasn’t living in Sweden, or if I had stayed in the United States.
What’s the culture around the paid family leave policy?
Something that we in the Labour & Delivery Unit at BB Stockholm try to signal intentionally from the beginning is that the father or partner’s role in everything is very important. We want to involve him in the entire process and try to show him that he’s a big part of this and nothing else is expected. We try to show the parents, the new family, that both partners are very important. Once a baby is born, we as professionals don’t take care of the baby at all. The baby stays with the parents the entire time and we give the baby to the father or partner as much as we give the baby to the mother.
We don’t allow the grandmothers to be in the Labour & Delivery unit or in aftercare because it’s only for the fathers or partners. Grandmothers often start taking over the care of the baby, saying “this is how you wrap the baby” or “let me hold the baby”, taking over the father or partner’s role. We believe it should be the parents working together and the partner helping the new mother. By only allowing the father or partner there after the birth, we’re signalling that it’s the parents and newborn baby as a unit. It’s all of these small things that make the family leave policy what it is today.
After birth, we as professionals talk to a family and say to mothers, your aim is to breastfeed, and during the first months postpartum, you’ll be the one taking care of the child much more than your partner because breastfeeding takes a lot of time and energy. During this time, you’ll be up during the night with the baby, so leave all of the housework to your partner. Around five or six months (when you aren’t breastfeeding all of the time), you need to put a plan into place on how the two of you as parents can equally take care of the baby and how you will divide your parental leave. Here, we’re planting seeds into the discussion as to what we expect as professionals, and helping to initiate planning how the parents will share responsibilities after breastfeeding and how the fathers will be involved.
We always mention thinking about how you share things at home and your plans for the future. We don’t tell them what to do, but by mentioning it, they come up with solutions themselves.
Then the Swedish system takes over in signalling to the fathers or partners their role in the responsibility of the child by reserving three months of parental leave for only the father or partner that the mother can’t touch, signalling that “we” as a culture expect the father or partner to take at the very least three months of parental leave to spend with their child. This is very important.
Are companies supportive of the parental leave policy?
It’s more modern for companies in Sweden to look at parental leave as something you should do to show that both partners are taking responsibility. For example, my husband was encouraged to take out his parental leave by his company. He has done it three times with each of our sons.. His company actually tops up his salary. He gets paid 80% of his salary from the government up to a certain amount, which means when he’s home with the kids, his salary would go down a little bit, but his company tops it up so that he's able to stay home without losing any money.. It’s incredibly unusual now for a partner to say “No, I won’t stay home with my baby,” and if you don’t take your leave, the outside perception would be quite negative - wondering “why would you not stay home with your kid?!” This is just another piece of the puzzle.
There are all of these little pieces and incentives showing and encouraging you both to stay home from the time of pregnancy. The government has benefits or rules in place around family leave and those are great, but it wouldn’t be possible to use up that time if the companies, the work life, and everyone around you didn’t think it was ok because it’s important that it doesn’t affect your career.
Why do you think it’s important for a partner/father to take parental leave as well as a mother?
It’s very important to share equal (or as equal with your partner as possible) leave from the beginning because that sets the standard for the rest of your parental life. If the mother takes out the majority of the parental leave and she stays at home much longer than the father/partner, she’ll also be the one staying home and taking care of the kids when they’re sick and will be the one taking more responsibility for childcare duties for many years ahead.
If you take an equal amount of leave from the beginning, then you share the responsibilities much more equally for the rest of your child’s lives. It comes much more naturally to stay home if you have already bonded with your kids during the early years and had those tough times with your children when they’re home sick. If you both put in the work and have equal time sharing these responsibilities and experiences, then you work as a team moving forward.
Have you noticed any benefits in regards to maternal health and wellbeing that you would attribute to paid family leave policies?
One of the most important aspects of the family leave policy is the culture around a father’s or partner’s involvement in childrearing. You can’t associate the parental leave policy with exact outcomes because it’s the system as a whole, a holistic way of thinking in the culture that one thing leads to another.
It’s not really just the policy itself that creates all of the benefits, it’s the entire culture around fathers and partners being such an integral part of a child’s life and childcare responsibilities that takes the burden off mothers being the primary caregivers.
The best thing about it is that as a mother, you’re able to create your own life. You can divide your time more freely if you have help from your partner. Because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you’re assigned to a certain life. You can choose what you want to do with your life, in addition to being a mother.
Everything has moved forward in the last 20 or 30 years. A lot has happened since the introduction of the policy to the point we’re at now where Sweden has one of the highest rates of gender equality and is considered one of the most equal countries in the world.
How has this affected you personally?
An eye-opening moment for me personally was when I was in the United States and doing research at Penn State and my husband was on his parental leave taking care of my first son. He was walking around the hotel lobby with our baby in a baby carrier on his front and people were giving him the strangest looks and inquired as to what he was doing. He responded, “My wife is doing research and I’m on my parental leave.” And the response was bewilderment. My husband came to me and said, “People think it’s strange that I’m here for my wife and taking care of our baby. They’re asking me questions, like “Do you feed your baby? Do you change him and do everything?” And my husband said “Yes of course!” It was a huge eye opener for us as to how different perceptions can be for a father’s role.
How do you think Sweden adopted this significant change (for men and women to adopt the policy and go against traditional roles) over such a short period of time?
It must be done slowly. There’s a long term goal that in 40 or 50 years we want women to be able to do this, and then you take small steps. The possibility for fathers to stay home for such a long period of time didn’t happen all at once. First, we had ten days for partners, then one month for only the partners, and then three months for the partners. You have to do it one piece at a time because it’s too great of a change to make all at once.
The government framing the policy is only one piece of the puzzle. Us, as women, need to connect with one another and set the bar differently within our own families. We need to demand and expect more help from our own partners because if we question the system as a group, we allow ourselves options and choices.
Parenting Together
General assumptions are that most mothers are naturally 'better' at caring for the baby than the partner. However, apart from breastfeeding, which means that we are close to our child, we are not biologically ahead of our partners, we simply spend a lot more time with our baby. Research shows that just like women, men also have a built-in biological mechanism that has evolved to cope with the change to parenthood. When men become fathers, their testosterone levels drop forever. And the more involved a father is in caring for his children, the lower his testosterone levels. Researchers believe that lower levels of this more aggressive hormone enable a father to connect and care for his baby.
“The real take-home message,” said Peter Ellison, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, is that “male parental care is important. It’s important enough that it’s actually shaped the physiology of men.”
And what’s more is that fathers who interact more with their children in their first few months of life could have a positive impact on their baby's cognitive development. In a study, published in the Infant Mental Health Journal, researchers from Imperial College London, King's College London and Oxford University looked at how fathers interacted with their babies at three months of age and measured the infants' cognitive development more than a year later. They found that babies whose fathers were more engaged and active when playing with them in their initial months performed better in cognitive tests at two years of age. Findings from the rapidly growing science of early childhood and early brain development show the positive, lifelong impact fathers can have by being positively engaged early in their children’s lives.
The take home message from all of this research is that women weren’t designed to care for children on their own, evolutionary and biologically speaking. Therefore, it’s important that as mothers we get support from our partners.
GETTING HELP FROM YOUR PARTNER
Dr. Charlotte Evlander recommends for a mother wanting her partner to be more involved in the responsibilities of childcare and homecare, to begin discussing your roles in pregnancy.
Ask your partner the following questions:
What are your expectations?
How involved in childcare responsibilities do you plan to be?
What’s your plan for your role in parenthood and what will that look like?
What’s your goal as a parent?
If your partner responds, “I want to provide financially. I want to go to work and be the income provider and I expect you to stay home and take care of the children,” then you know that’s the starting point. By asking these questions, your partner can start thinking about how involved they want to be, knowing that you have a different bond with your children based on your involvement as a parent.
Secondly, you as a mother need to be very clear with what your expectations are from the beginning, and share these with your partner during pregnancy. You can use the following statements to begin the conversation:
For us to work as a couple and a family, I expect....
I would love for us to be on [this equality level]. What are your thoughts on this and do you think this is something that we could achieve together?
By starting the discussion in pregnancy, you can refer back to it after the baby is born, saying we discussed this during pregnancy and together decided this as our plan. It can then be an ongoing discussion as to how you want to work as a family. If you don’t start the conversation in pregnancy, you and your partner may have very different ideas of parenthood, not knowing what is important to one another, and once the baby is born, you’re one step behind. You have to be proactive and have an open line of communication as to what both of your expectations and goals are as parents.
HOW MOTHERS DESCRIBE THE PARENTAL LEAVE POLICY IN SWEDEN
“My favourite thing about being a mother and raising children in Sweden is that we’re given an opportunity to be with our children when they’re little. The parental leave system is great and there’s generally no expectation to get back to work quickly. I also love the fact that dads/partners are given the opportunity to be a big part of the child’s life due to paternal leave options. In Sweden, parents don’t have to choose between a career and being there during their child's first few years of life. But also, maybe most importantly, fathers/partners are actively included in the role in the raising of a child.” - Asabea, mother of two, living in Stockholm, Sweden.
WORLDWIDE BENEFITS OF PAID FAMILY LEAVE
Paid family leave for new parents is shown to be incredibly beneficial for mothers, the health of babies, and partner relationships, while allowing both parents to find success professionally. It has a positive impact on both maternal physical health and mental health, with recent research indicating women who took longer than 12 weeks paid maternity leave reported fewer depressive symptoms.
When partners have access to paid leave, both people have healthier trajectories of stress, sleep, and mood from pregnancy to the postpartum period. And this is particularly important because the impact of stress on maternal health and wellbeing can be multi-faceted, affecting a mother’s mood, risk of depression, and anxiety disorders, as well as the ability to bond with their new baby. Highly stressed mothers may have more difficulty sleeping, breastfeeding, and caring sensitively for their infants.
Dr. Darby Saxbe, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, studies stress and health within close relationships, particularly family relationships. She follows couples that are transitioning to first-time parenthood, from pregnancy through the first year postpartum and has been looking into the ways that paid family leave policies impact stress and health of new parents.
We often think of stress and physical health as individual processes, but in fact we're very interconnected with the people around us, especially the people that cohabit with us.
Darby’s own experiences of motherhood inspired her research into family leave policies and its impact on parents. Darby says of her own experiences, “I struggled to adjust after my kids were born, even though I had access to lots of resources and support during pregnancy. It made me think of how transformative and challenging the transition to parenthood can be, and about the need to provide support to new families during this time period. I had two kids during my training, one at the end of graduate school and one as a postdoctoral researcher, and I didn't get paid maternity leave after either child was born. I fell through the cracks because as a trainee, I wasn't funded like a regular employee. My husband is a freelancer, so he didn't get paid parental leave either. I was very lucky that in both cases I had supportive supervisors who let me take time off from work, but family leave shouldn't be based on luck.”
In looking at how paid family leave impacts the transition to parenthood, Dr. Saxbe’s research shows paid family leave:
Allows families time to rest and recuperate after birth. It gives them time to bond with the new baby, and to establish caregiving routines such as getting the baby on a feeding or sleep schedule.
Can be essential for breastfeeding mothers in establishing the breastfeeding relationship.
Reduces stress and the pressure of outside demands for all parents during a very important time in their lives.
Is linked with lower stress and better sleep, which benefits the couple relationship as well as the parent-child relationship.
In her research, Dr. Saxbe has found the transition to parenthood represents a critical window for determining a woman’s mental and physical health, both as a new mother and later in life. She suggests maternity leave benefits bring about significant mental health benefits for working mothers, which extend well past the period of birth and into older age. Other findings imply maternity leave benefits not only protect mothers and their children around the period of childbirth, but may contribute to healthy ageing in general.
“We know the transition to parenthood is transformative on many levels - we see changes to the brain, to the body's balance of hormones, to our mood and emotions, and to our social relationships. It's a rich nexus of all these different changes happening at once. When there’s a lot of change, you see heightened vulnerability, but also heightened opportunity. The first few weeks, months, and years of parenthood really matter and help set the stage both for the child's development and for the parent-child relationship.”