Extract from The Wall Street Journal, Monday June 22 1987:
By Neil Gilbert
STOCKHOLM - For years Sweden's smorgasbord of social benefits has been the envy around the world of those who advocate liberal public provisions. A close look, however, discloses some disturbing trends in Swedish family patterns, at least partly attributable to these programs.
Swedish parents are entitled to 12 months' maternity leave, which they can share between themselves. This is not merely unpaid leave with a promise to hold one's job that is bandied about in the U.S. Swedish parents on maternity leave receive 90% of their regular salaries for the first nine months and approximately $240 a month for the rest of the period. Six months of this leave may be taken at any time until the child is eight years old. Parents also get 60 days of sick leave a year for each child under age 12, again at 90% of pay.
In addition, there is a vast network of day-care services that provide trained staff, a supervisory ratio of two adults for every five children under three years old, and well-equipped facilities. These elaborate services cost on the average about $10.000 a year per child, 90% of which is subsidized through a combination of state and local grants. The remaining 10% is collected through user fees. The government pays each family an allowance of about $960 a year per child under age 16, a sum that rises by 50% for the third child and 10% for the fourth and each one thereafter.
Nourished by all these social provisions, one would expect the Swedish family to be stable, secure and flourishing. This is not the case. With four divorces for every seven marriages in 1984, Sweden registered one of the highest divorce rates in the western world. At an average of 1.8 children per family the birthrate is considerably below the level necessary to sustain the Swedish population. In 1984 almost 25% of all pregnancies ended in abortion.
Beyond the high divorce and low birth-rates, an astounding 46% of the births in 1984 were out-of-wedlock. This figure reflects an extraordinary trend toward non-marital, cohabitation rather than the proliferation of single-parent families. Among the young, formal marriages are distinctly out of fashion. Over 50% of the population living with partners in the 20-to-30-year-old group is unmarried, preferring what has come to be termed consensual unions. While these arrangements account for the majority of out-of-wedlock births, in 1980 the number of single parent families amounted to 18% of all households with children. In an additional 11%, one of the adult partners was a stepparent.
Alongside the rise in cohabitation there has been a dramatic increase in the number of young adults living alone; from 1976 to 1985 the proportion of those in the 26-to-35- year-old group living alone shot up by one-third, to 20% from 13%. These parallel developments might be explained by the fact that cohabitation allows for greater choice and a process of "sorting out" whereby those with less desirable attributes eventually get left behind; at the same time people with highly desirable attributes who may want a commitment more binding than that of a shared residence have difficulty in finding partners ready for marriage.
When cohabiting couples dissolve their relationship no official record is made. Thus the high rate of cohabitation confounds true estimates of family dissolution, which are normally based on official records of divorce. Since the
dissolution rate of cohabiting couples with one child is more than twice as high as that for comparable married couples, and for those without children almost six times as high as for married couples, the real magnitude of family breakup in Sweden is substantially larger than evidenced by an already prodigious divorce rate. This is particularly the case when cohabitation is seen as common-law marriage, which is headed toward legal status in Sweden.
These circumstances all point to the emergence of a new social norm, one which transmits the expectation that family relationships are not supposed to last. Statistics do not convey the texture and quality of family life in Sweden. It is a prosperous nation in which single-parent families, children, the sick and the elderly are well cared for. If the family is in trouble, the Swedes do not seem to notice it. Indeed, one finds remarkably little concern among government officials and academics about the erosion of traditional family patterns.
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At a University of Stockholm seminar for demographers and sociologists, after two hours of learned discourse on the methodological fine points of measuring cohabitation. a question was asked regarding how the high divorce and dissolution rates might influence the average person's expectations about family life. The group's response was that it had no data on the subject and did not give it much thought.
Without going so far as to cast Sweden into the mold of a tribal kinship system, this complacency might be explained by a deeper level of social cohesion resting on common ancestry and cultural identification that holds people together despite the experience of a striking departure from traditional family life. Practically speaking, if the Swedes are as untroubled as they appear, one reason is that the immediate social and economic costs of family breakup are cushioned, if not totally absorbed, by the mass of social provisions available from the state. For the performance of nearly every function, the act of procreation excepted, the mature parental state offers a ready substitute for the family unit.
While the benefits of family policy and other welfare provisions have softened the insecurities and material consequences of family dissolution, one cannot observe the Swedish experience without wondering about the other side of the coin. To what extent did these policies encourage the conditions to which they are not so responsive? It would stretch the point to claim that family policies in Sweden precipitated the erosion of the traditional family unit. In these matters there are always larger social and economic forces - the women' s movement, sexual liberation, extended periods of education, market needs for an expanding labor force - at work. In this vein, the spread of AIDS is likely to have a stabilizing effect on the family unit as the risk of entering new sexual unions inhibits movement away from existing relationships. But to say that social policies are not determinative is not to admit that they are without influence. The case of working mothers with young children is instructive.
The main reason that 83% of the married women with children under age seven work is that the
average Swedish family cannot get by on the salary of one wage earner. The main reason that a single-earner married couple with two children receiving the average production worker's wage cannot afford to live on this salary is that they must pay 62% of it to the government. An executive earning $73.000 pays 71% taxes. These taxes in turn go to finance a host of benefits distributed freely by the state, including day-care services subsidized at as much as $9.000 per child (and used, incidentally, in much higher numbers by the professional class than the working class). The absence of a choice between this "free" day-care service and, for example, a tax rebate equal to the cost of this service certainly affords a financial inducement to shift responsibility for the care of children from the family to the state. Here, as in other cases, social policies of the parental state are rarely designed to sustain or encourage traditional family arrangements.
In their economic relations with family and state, Swedish workers often dispense more of their income to the state than they spend on the household needs of the family. In return, the state assumes some of the basic family responsibilities for child care and economic support. This exchange reduces the individual's dependence on the family unit and heightens reliance on government programs. It is a trade-off that apparently satisfies the Swedish people. A country of 8.3 million, mainly of Nordic stock, Sweden's size and homogeneity lend an intimacy and solidarity to the social contract between individual and state that demography precludes in the U.S.
Yet all is not roses. While liberating individuals from the constraints, some would say tyranny, of traditional family life, the parental state levies its own brand of oppression. A Swedish survey in 1984, for example, shows 81% of the respondents agreeing that "the state has become increasingly despotic at the expense of individual rights." While Swedish citizens are hardly about to storm the Riksdag, a more recent 1987 poll, reported in Dagens Nyheter suggests that they might press government for a bit more choice regarding the opportunity to stay at home with their children in the early years. Over 60% of the women surveyed indicated that in lieu of investing more resources for the expansion of public day-care services, they would prefer a child-care allowance to assist parents who wanted to stay home with their children or to purchase care privately.
How well does the Swedish model of family policy work? The answer is to some extent dependent on how desirable one finds the traditional family arrangement of a lasting union between husband and wife with children who are cared for at home by the mother, at least through the early years of childhood. Neither by intent nor outcome has the Swedish model strengthened this pattern. Instead, it has contributed to reducing both the frictions and the bonds of interdependent family relations. Those who disapprove of the traditional family unit may find the emerging pattern of alternative arrangements a welcome change. They should be heartened by the fact that in the short run, at least, the immediate results of family dissolution have not created a noticeable problem for Swedish society. But the final tally remains to be taken. The long-term effects on the emotional development of children, interpersonal relationships, sexual equality, family commitments, and civic morality may well reveal serious contradictions in the Swedish model of family policy.