Minding the Care Gap: Daycare Usage and the Negotiation of Work, Family and Gender Among Swedish Parents

Abstract

The article asks whether daycare can alleviate work–family tensions in the dual-earner society or if perceptions of 'care gaps' will hamper women's careers. Using survey data from Swedish parents with pre-school children (n ≈ 2250) and qualitative interviews of survey respondents (n = 40), we explore how children’s daycare hours and parents’ reflections on daycare hours are related to mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in paid and unpaid work and to their perceptions of stress. The results show that parents have a strong ambition to limit daycare hours. This ambition provides a stressful dilemma for mothers but for fathers, daycare is not a source of stress. Maternal part-time work is an important tool for managing daycare hours, but collides with ideals of gender equality. Full-time work can be combined with short daycare hours, provided that the parents take shifts in the home and share care responsibilities. Sharing of care work also reduces mothers' stress. However, such arrangements require flexible schedules which are more available to parents in high-skill jobs. Single parents have little opportunity to keep daycare hours short.