Föräldraförsäkring (Parent Leave)

 

People always ask us if we intend to have children here, or go back to Sweden. I tell them about the föräldraförsäkring and they just go “ahh.... So in Sweden then, I guess?”

Basically it gives all new parents (the mom or the dad) the chance to stay home for a year and some months after giving birth, getting paid to make sure their infant grows up to be a good little socialist (just kidding!). Currently, two months are “individual”, meaning that if either the mom or the dad doesn’t want to stay home at all those days are lost. It is a pretty remarkable deal compared to what parents get in the rest of the world, I realized after moving abroad. One day I was riding the bus in Minneapolis, talking to a very pregnant bus driver and she told me she only had two weeks of vacation, so she was going to keep on driving right up to the second her water broke. Stories like that are hard for Swedish women to comprehend.

The big political showdown right now is whether more days should be individualized or not. The dads are still not taking out nearly as much as fifty percent of the time, leading to women being absent from the work force for a longer then their male counterparts. That in turn means that they are left behind when it comes to raises and other salary increases. The left-wing parties are generally positive towards a more individualized föräldraförsäkring, whereas the right wing/liberals want the families to decide for themselves who stays home.