Abstract
In Finland, all parents, regardless of gender, are eligible for parental leave and there are no restrictive eligibility criteria. In practice, however, the statutory leave options are not equally available to all parents. Since the 1970s, steps have been taken in redesigning the leave scheme to make it more inclusive. Several reforms have been made to promote equality, mainly between women and men, but also between diverse families, such as adoptive families, multiple-birth families or same-sex parent families. The ‘demotherisation’ of parental-leave rights has slowly shifted the focus from biological mothers to fathers and non-biological parents. In the most recent reforms, the focus has widened from equality between parents to include equality between children regardless of the form of the family that they are born or adopted into.
Highlights
Finland is a Nordic welfare state where national policies and public responsibility aim to support parents of young children in the reconciliation of paid employment and childcare responsibilities
Based on our analysis of the Finnish leave policy development, we argue that what Sophie Mathieu (2016) has described as the demotherisation process has been a process of shifting the care responsibilities of the biological mother toward whomever else is there to care for the child, and that this form of biological demotherisation has been crucial for making the parental leave system more inclusive for parents and children living in diverse family forms
The data consist of revisions made to the Act of Health Insurance (The Finnish Government, 1963) concerning paid parental leave in Finland from 1963 until the end of 2020, reports of government task forces considering parental leave in 2005–2017, government proposals related to parental leave reforms of 2017 and 2019, and background material consisting of proposals of parental leave models by researchers, labour market organisations and other stakeholder organisations, as well as material from the on-going parental leave reform published by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health
Summary
Finland is a Nordic welfare state where national policies and public responsibility aim to support parents of young children in the reconciliation of paid employment and childcare responsibilities. In 2019, Finland introduced equal paid parental leave for single mothers, giving them eligibility to the father’s quota which was previously available only to single fathers and two-parent families. The non-transferable father’s quota has resulted in higher take-up of leave by fathers (Duvander et al, 2019; Salmi & Lammi-Taskula, 2015) This development can be called ‘demotherisation’ (Mathieu, 2016), referring to the degree of independence mothers enjoy from the necessity of performing care work, and the extent to which they can offload childcare responsibilities onto other caregivers. We show that the demotherisation process of parental leave in Finland from the early 1970s onwards has driven the system of parental leave schemes from supporting mainly biological mothers toward supporting biological fathers and increased the parental leave eligibility and social inclusion of non-biological parents. We claim that the shift towards promoting fathercare, and simultaneous demotherisation, has paved the way to parental leave eligibility of non-biological parents and parents in diverse family situations
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