Intensive Parenting in Dual-Earner, Dual-Carer Society: Integrating Role Conflict into Gendered Attitudes toward Parenting

Intensive parenting, with its high levels of resource and emotional investment in children, may well be related to how people view parent and worker roles. But individuals’ ideas about how these two gendered roles may be in conflict have not previously been studied as an aspect of intensive parenting attitudes, nor have women’s versus men’s predominant profiles of intensive parenting attitudes been compared. Examining the relatively low-gender-inequality context of Sweden, we analyzed nationally representative data from the 2021 Swedish Generations and Gender Survey (N=7679). A minority of Swedish men and women agreed that work conflicts with either fathering or mothering, suggesting that gender essentialism is not a core component of intensive parenting attitudes in Sweden. These averages obscured substantial and gendered variation in individual-level attitudinal profiles. Most women and nearly half of men held internally inconsistent intensive parenting profiles, with those from more privileged social statuses disproportionately rejecting work-family conflict and subscribing only selectively to aspects of intensive parenting. This contrasts with previous work from other country contexts. Findings also suggested that women’s social positions may more directly shape their intensive parenting attitudes relative to men. Work-family role conflict was more concordantly tied to other domains of intensive parenting attitudes among men, while women were more divided. The seeming presence of competing parenting ideologies, which are relatively ungendered in content but perceived differently by women versus men, suggests an evolving landscape of parenting as Swedish society and social structures change.