Parents, how do you manage summer breaks, who takes care of your children when there is no school?
Parents, how do you manage summer breaks, who takes care of your children when there is no school?
Changed the title as it wasn't clear
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Interesting, do you get that every year? In Belgium for instance parental leave in a one time thing, you only get it once when they are born, afterwards you have to figure something out
Ah, that's unfortunately not as generous as in Sweden then.
As a father, I get 10 days of emergency parental leave that are available from the day the child is born (and available within a window of maybe 2 months or something? Can't remember).
Then both parents get 480 days of parental leave days to share, per child. It's automatically split equally in a parental leave days account with the national insurance authority, handling such things as welfare and parental leave, etc.
We have two kids, so altogether me and my wife have gotten 480 days total, each.
Each parent can also transfer 45 days per child to the other parent, which I did because she wanted to spend more time with our first child.
You also have to spend your days before a certain age. Only 96 days can be saved after the age of 4. This is to encourage spending time with your child at a younger age. After the age of 12, no days can be saved.
So with all of these rules in place, you get to decide when and how you spend your parental leave days.
Still some caveats with respect to employers' perspective:
- employers usually require a certain amount of time of heads-up before you go on leave, but 3 months is enough that they can't deny your request, by law.
- employers only have to honor 3 parental leave requests per year.
So that's it, basically. 👍
For smaller children there is heavily subsidised preschool (max monthly fee 1600 SEK or so where I live) that you have a right to if you are working (i.e. not on vacation), I think there is "fritids" for older children? It's so far away for me that I haven't looked into it, but AFAICT if your kids are not old enough to take care of themselves at home they are usually entitled to some sort of care.
I keep forgetting that childcare is generally unavailable, unaffordable, or both since where I'm from I've never heard of anyone unable to afford childcare.
To add to what @[email protected] was saying above, you usually also have the right to work fewer hours if you have as small child (unpaid), but I'm not sure about the caveats. I work 75% through that mechanism. In my case it's not really a choice; if I'd work 100% like my wife too many chores wouldn't get done. I also wouldn't be able to do that on the amount of sleep and rest I'm getting (a few hours too few and almost none).
I should also add that you are explicitly only given subsidised childcare when doing paid wage work. You're not allowed to for example pop in and do some shopping on the way to pick-up, which I presume most people do anyway from time to time because who is going to check.
This system is nice in the traditionally social democrat smoke stack sense of allowing you and everyone else the freedom to do paid wage work at the factory and very little else. With a more or less private system you're paying for the service of "please take care of my children", which means that the marginal cost of "please take care of my child for an extra hour while I talk to my wife/go shopping/clean at home" is huge by comparison, but what you get for that is a greater degree of equality and availability.
I write the last part mainly to work against the stereotype of Sweden as a socialist utopia; sure this is a socialist policy, but it's a pretty boring one that's very 1950s.
You're not allowed to for example pop in and do some shopping on the way to pick-up, which I presume most people do anyway from time to time because who is going to check.
Indeed. Another perspective (not my own) is:
"I work weekends sometimes as a nurse and I get no freaking rest and recovery unless I send the kids to daycare on the one day in the middle of the week that I'm not working this week, lest I collapse from exhaustion". Not gonna lie, it's more healthy for the kids as well because it creates a better routine for them.
Or,
"If I don't pop in to buy this carton of milk for 5-10 minutes before pickup, we'll have to do it after pickup, in which case it'll take 45 minutes to an hour and the kids will be tired and irritated (and so will I) and get less sleep because of the extra time before supper and they'll be cranky tomorrow morning causing all kinds of domino effect havoc".
Both cases are worse for the kids, if you follow the rules.
🤷♂️ I'm definitely guilty of not following the rules 100 %. Actually somewhat proud of it, but I can't admit to it to anyone because I'll be guilty of fraud or some shit.
Where I live the max daycare fee is 2110 SEK for two children, which we pay. It is based on income though, so you could pay less with less total monthly household income. The fee is 1,265.63 SEK for the first child and 843.75 SEK for the second child. There's a descending step system for the fee, per child, so the more children you have in daycare, the less you pay on average, per child. There's also some sort of tax reduction included with that price, like 20-25% or something. Can't remember exactly the details.
I checked now and we pay 1688 SEK / month, which I think is the maximum.
For one child?
Edit: Ah, right. Yes, it's the same fee for us, possibly we live in the same kommun.
But there's also a special clause for children above 3 years of age, which both of mine are.
För barn 3–5 år som enbart går i allmän förskola (15 timmar per vecka) betalar du ingen avgift.
För övriga 3–5 åringar med plats på förskola och pedagogisk omsorg minskas avgiften med 25 procent automatiskt med anledning av rätten till allmän förskola. Det gäller från 1 juli det år då barnet fyller tre år.
So that's 1688 - 25% = 1266 SEK (for our first-born). Possibly you don't have that discount because your child is younger than 3?
Yep, and also she’s there between 08:30-16:10 every day so quite a lot more than 15 h/week.
Ah, sorry, didn’t see the second bullet point. Yep, she’s one and nine months.
Beautiful age 🥰 Enjoy it!
Very interesting, thanks!
My pleasure!
I hope you find better answers to your original question than I was able to provide. 😊
Should be okay, quite interesting so far!