Abstract
The aim of this article is to review key aspects of family demographics and family policies in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland, and discuss similarities and differences between the five countries. After a brief historical sketch, some aspect s of family demographics – union formation and dissolution, fertility, and female employment rates – are presented. The main part of the article reviews family policies: family benefits, parental leaves, public child-care and financial support for home-based care. The article ends with a discussion of future challenges for Nordic family policies, and the potential for policy transfer. It is emphasised that the “Nordic model” of family policy is a model with at least four faces: the “low-key” Finnish version, the maximalist equality-and-choice-oriented Norwegian version, the Swedish dual earner/dual carer version and the universal employment-oriented Danish version.
Highlights
Not all the international attention is flattering
The aim of this article is to provide an overview of some aspects of family demographics and family policies in the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland
Some main figures regarding divorce and extramarital childbearing, female employment, and child poverty are reviewed. For each of these indicators, comparisons are made with the largest European Union (EU) countries and the EU average
Summary
Policies in the Nordic countries gain international attention. An important reason for this is that they appear to produce good results: the Nordic countries combine comparatively high levels of fertility with high female employment rates and low rates of child poverty. The main section of the paper presents the key aspects of family policies in the five Nordic countries by looking at family benefits, parental leave arrangements, public childcare, and financial support for home-based care. The “gender and social policy debate,” which was vivid during the late 1990s and early 2000s, further refined and nuanced the picture of gender and family policy traditions in the Nordic countries In this literature, Norway and Finland are typically grouped to one side, with Sweden and Denmark on the other. Important measures included heavily subsidised childcare and long parental leaves, combined with a taxation system that rewarded dual-income families Those two countries consistently moved away from Lewis’ (1992) male breadwinner model and towards gender equality in all areas. The scope is limited to issues concerning families with dependent children
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