What is it about?
This article, co-authored with Kari Stefansen discusses how the same family policies and welfare state structures may be experienced as enabling for some groups and as restraining for others. We find that Polish parents, who are new to the Norwegian welfare state, embrace and use the various elements, like parental leave, the paternal quota of parental leave and kindergarten in a creative and diverse way, negotiating the parts they find problematic. Similarly, the norm of gender equality in Norway becomes a resource in changing gender relations in the family. In contrast, the Norwegian parents, to a larger extent express feelings of constraints. For the Norwegian parents, the extensive support for working parents as well as gender equality in the family are taken for granted: however middle-class parents struggle to live up the strong norm of 'living the right life' of dual full-time and sharing care equally, and failure to live up to the norm could leed to feelings of shame. Norwegian parents of working class background to a larger extent had problems related to the structures themselves. For instance, when the father was not able to take his share of parental leave, the family lost this part of the leave and the child had to start earlier in kindergarten, despite working class parents preferring to postpone kindergarten. By using migration as a lens, the article sheds light on how family policies affect the majority population differently than the 'newcomers', and how the strong emphasis on one particular family model—the dual–earner–dual carer model, may also lead to a limitation of freedom and to new class-based injustices in opportunities to live the life one wants and in access to welfare state entitlements.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The important insight from this study is that family policies are used in different ways and may be experienced in different ways by different groups, and that the use of entitlements like the paternal quota of parental leave takes place in a complex context of everyday life and life-course transitions, rejecting a simple 'fit' between for instance the use of particular entitlements and gender equality in the family. In contrast, the normative and institutional structures underpinning one particular family model may limit freedom and lead to new injustices.
Perspectives
This is the last of four articles from a Polish-Norwegian research project on work–family issues in Norway and Poland, which allowed us to develop several comparative analyses. Looking at Norwegian family policies and the majority population in Norway in a migration perspective, like we do in this article, proved really interesting. The other publications adress themes such as transnational family life, perceptions of employer support towards men’s caring roles, and barriers towards using entitlements when they are in place.
Margunn Bjørnholt
Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Same but different: Polish and Norwegian parents’ work–family adaptations in Norway, Journal of European Social Policy, March 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0958928718758824.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
