Intensive Parenting Attitudes in Sweden: An Exception or a Global Pattern?

Objective: To examine predominant profiles of intensive parenting attitudes in Sweden.

Background: Attitudes promoting “intensive parenting” are prevalent in many countries and are associated with mothering and socioeconomic and racial/ethnic privilege. Are intensive parenting attitudes widespread in Sweden, a lower-inequality country that has historically intervened to shift burdens off parents and encourage gender equality?

Method: Using the 2021 Generations and Gender Survey (N = 7907), descriptive and latent class analyses identified predominant patterns of intensive parenting attitudes among Swedes and their sociodemographic predictors.

Results: Weak to moderate average population-level agreement with measures of intensive parenting attitudes obscured considerable variability across individuals. About half of respondents, disproportionately younger, foreign-born, and female, belonged to latent classes that strongly or moderately subscribed to intensive parenting attitudes. Another third of the sample belonged to a discordant latent class dominated by older, Swedish-born, and class-advantaged respondents that espoused some aspects of intensive parenting attitudes but not others, in a distinct pattern not yet identified in other contexts.

Conclusion: Results for respondents from socioeconomically, ethnically, and gender-advantaged backgrounds supported the “Swedish exceptionalism” hypothesis, whereas less advantaged disproportionately subscribed to internationally prevalent intensive parenting attitudes.

Implications: This dissonance in predominant parenting attitudes between more and less advantaged groups of Swedes may have interesting implications for future norms and policies.