Many dads already participate in homework today with life and fun. Nevertheless, it is the mothers who pull the heaviest load. According to the Academy's central organization Saco, the average father does 18 hours of homework a week, while the average mother spends 30 hours working on laundry, cleaning, cooking and taking care of children.
At the same time, many fathers seem to believe that they are equal in household work. Opinion surveys have been conducted showing that men believe they do half the work, while women believe that their male partners only perform 33 percent of the jobs.
Seize parental insurance!In an international comparison, Swedish fathers in the world elite belong to being with their children, at least what can be measured. It all depends on the Swedish parental insurance, which with 480 days is one of the most generous in the world.
The insurance has been around for more than 40 years. In 1974, fathers took 0.5 percent of parental leave. In 1995, when the first "father's month" was introduced, the proportion had increased to 10 percent and in 2017 to 29 percent.
But gender equality has slowed down, among other things, shows TCO's equality index. Therefore, an investigation suggested that the number of individual months, which cannot be transferred to the other parent, should increase from three to five months. However, no decision has been made.
Hang out with the kids - start working part time!One explanation for the unevenly distributed parental leave is that men generally have higher incomes and therefore lose more money when they stay home. However, the statistics show that even in families where the mother earns the most, she is still the parent.
When a couple has children, it is almost always the woman who goes down during working hours. Among academics, only one in ten people choose to work less during their toddler years, while it is three times as common among women. Even among people with the workforce, there are significantly more women than men who work part-time to take care of children.
Obviously, working less makes life easier for many families with children, but it also leads to financial injustice - both today and in the future. Part-time work entails both poor salary development and career opportunities and, in the long run, leads to lower pensions.
Take care of the cough - wobble more!Drying vomit and nosy noses is not so fun, but for some reason dads seem more willing to be home with sick children than healthy ones. According to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency's figures, 40 percent of the number of VAB days goes to a man. But the fact remains - six out of ten times a child gets sick, it is the mother who stays at home from work.
By being more with your children, both when they are healthy and sick, you can also have a closer relationship with them. In a survey, only 10 percent of children would primarily call dad when they have something important to tell, while 50 percent preferred mom. Not even 10 children replied that they had more contact with dad than mother.
A quarter of the children also responded that they wanted to have a closer relationship - to their father.