Strategies for dual-caring: work or family strategies?

Helen Eriksson, Stockholm University

Care strategies are conceptualized as a trajectory of time allocations by mothers and fathers over the child’s early years. Longitudinal monthly data for 2,158 parental couples with children born in Sweden in 2009 reveal great diversity in how Swedish parents provide parental care during the first 24 months of the child’s life. Couples not only share care to varying extents, but also use different dual-caring strategies and/ or lengths of parental care. Three out of four dual-caring couples engaged in a strategy of long solo-caring periods where the mother takes leave to care for 8 to 14 months and then the father for 3 to 6 months. A quarter of dual-caring couples instead employed a strategy of repeated turn-taking over a period of 5 to 11 months. Multinomial logistic regression models are estimated to predict the likelihood of employing each care strategies.