Creating egalitarian families: factors that shape work-family balance among the adult children of immigrants in Sweden

Calvin Goldscheider, Brown University
Fran Goldscheider, Brown University
Eva Bernhardt, Stockholm University

This paper focuses on factors increasing the likelihood that young adults whose parents were born in Turkey, Poland, and Sweden will share family financial and unpaid responsibilities equally between mothers and fathers, with mothers employed and fathers engaged in domestic tasks. Using longitudinal data, we examine the effects of holding attitudes favoring a more egalitarian balance of work and family when children are young on the actual balance of work and family four years later. We analyze a 1999 survey of young adults in Sweden (Family and Working Life in the 21st Century) and the follow-up survey conducted in 2003. The survey included 2,326 original respondents ages 22 and 26; 500 had at least one parent who was born either in Turkey or Poland. We focus on the factors increasing adoption of Swedish family forms on this dimension. In addition to examining how attitudes at the original survey shape behavior differentially among these three groups, we consider the how measures of exposure to Swedish life (education, neighborhood ethnic segregation, parental intermarriage, and disrupted childhood family structure condition the effects of attitudes about gender balance in work and family on the type of families these young adults form.