Taking Turns or Halving It All: Care Trajectories of Dual-Caring Couples

Interview and observational studies document that dual-caring is characterized by temporality. Two ‘ideal-typical’ trajectories are identified: ‘halving it all’ in which couples divide care equally on a daily or weekly basis and ‘taking turns’ in which parents take month- or year-long turns in serving as primary caregivers to the child. This study utilizes a new source of couple-level longitudinal information on parental leave to investigate dual-caring trajectories in contemporary Sweden. Results show that while care trajectories in which only one parent serves as the primary caregiver can be captured without longitudinal information, the dominant dual-caring trajectory cannot. In fact, despite a uniquely flexible parental leave system that allows egalitarian couples to share care on a daily basis, most couples do not share care in every point in time, but ‘take turns’ in serving as the primary caregiver to the child, with the mother’s ‘turn’ preceding the father’s. The results demonstrate that cross-sectional and aggregate measures of child care may fail to detect emerging trends in dual-caring.