We are glad to share our new working paper which examines the overlooked consequences of Sweden’s gender-equality-driven family policies for low-resourced single mothers. Although the ability to combine paid work and family life in a gender-equal way has been a longstanding policy aim in Sweden, these policies are predominantly built around the ideal of two-parent households who can share earnings and caring responsibilities. Building directly on the findings from rEUsilience’s earlier qualitative focus groups in Sweden, this new paper focuses on the experiences of parents who do not share family responsibilities gender-equally, and how they fare in a context where policies are designed to underpin gender-equal sharing.
Drawing on the qualitative focus group interview data collected within the rEUsilience project, this study focused on the thirty-one single mothers and coupled parents (16 single mothers, 13 coupled mothers, and 2 coupled fathers) who were recruited through community organisations in four Swedish cities and participated in a focus group during the spring of 2023. While the earlier findings revealed shared experiences of struggling to make ends meet, feelings of anxiety and shame, and common difficulties in accessing social policy rights, this study – within the context of critically examining the Swedish dual-earner-dual-carer model – sheds light on and attempts to understand the differences in single mothers’ experiences around shared parenting and child responsibilities compared to those of low-resourced coupled parents.
Firstly, the focus groups findings reveal that many single mothers in this study bear the full weight of parenting without the benefit of a co-parent’s time, income, or caregiving duties. This results in what author Backman terms a ‘gendered lack of division of labour’, pointing towards the fact that these single mothers often take on the lion’s share of both practical and financial responsibilities without benefiting at all, or in a way they consider fair, from the other parent’s resources. For many single mothers, carrying these responsibilities alone often forces difficult trade-offs or having to rely on children to meet adult responsibilities due to gaps in the support systems and a lack of flexibility, which can lead to financial, mental, emotional, and physical strain.
Secondly, this study shows that low-resourced single mothers are often penalised when policies are not sensitive to their needs. A notable difference between coupled parents and single mothers in this study was the practical impact of joint legal custody and the accompanying expectations for single mothers to share caregiving responsibilities. For example, since 2014, the child benefit has been automatically split between parents with joint legal custody, regardless of their actual involvement. Furthermore, the exchanges between the mothers during the focus groups illustrated the various complexities that can arise when benefits presume equal sharing of (financial) responsibilities between parents. The issues raised ranged from the practical burdens of having to chase up disengaged fathers and feeling unable to protect children from harmful contact to financial losses stemming from dual-earner-dual-carer policies. These policies either assume shared parenting arrangements (such as child benefit and child support) or set single mothers behind in relative terms thus do not compensate for their absence (for example leave arrangements to take care of sick children).
The low-resourced single mothers in this study face various emotional, practical, and economic consequences stemming from expectations to collaborate with disengaged fathers due to policies that frequently assume shared parenting, even when it does not occur in practice. Additionally, they expressed feeling that society and the welfare states under-recognize the vulnerabilities tied to single parenting in terms of lack of awareness, understanding, and support, while simultaneously feeling the expectation to do as much for their children and communities as two-parent families.
Taken together, these insights build upon the data of the Swedish rEUsilience focus groups, nuancing the Gender Revolution Framework – which posits that gender-equal sharing of family responsibilities is beneficial for all families and which has focused primarily on the benefits of increased father involvement – by highlighting the stratified nature of progress in terms of the disadvantages for low-resourced single mothers. This study used Sweden as a case to understand how a one-size-fits-all policy, focusing on dual-earner-dual-carer families, shapes the everyday circumstances and experiences of low-resourced single mothers in particular. This working paper therefore contributes to a critical understanding of how a stratified and incomplete gender revolution and policies designed to underpin gender-equal sharing may disadvantage parents who do not share family responsibilities gender-equally, as in this case, low-resourced single mothers in Sweden.
Read the full working papere here.