Parental leave – and then what? A study of new parents’ negotiations about work, care and parental leave

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative interviews with Swedish mothers and fathers, this article aims to study the negotiations between parents before and after the birth of their first child. When expecting a child, parents need for instance to decide how to divide their parental leave. After the child is born they have to negotiate about the division of care tasks, paid work and housework. The aim of this article is to analyse how these negotiations take place, and how the initial negotiations are followed up later, when the couple become parents. The overall research question is as follows: how are the negotiations about the division of care and work embedded in other social relationships, and in workplace and financial conditions? Swedish parents are particularly interesting to study because gender equality has been a political goal for a long time in Sweden. Nonetheless, earlier studies of Swedish parents have shown that the division of work and care becomes more ‘traditional’ as couples become parents, and Swedish women still take more parental leave than men (Boye and Evertsson, 2014; Duvander and Wiklund, 2019). The results show that the couples were engaged in constant explicit or implicit negotiations about the daily care. The results furthermore indicate that factors like working conditions influenced the decision-making processes, as did relationships with, for instance, the child’s grandmothers.