Nanny care in Sweden: The inequalities of everyday doings of care

Nanny and au pair care in Sweden: new actors in the welfare state

Historically, since the Second World War, Swedish family politics has been driven by two overarching ideas: social equality, and in a later stage, gender equality (Esping-Andersen, 2016; Lundqvist, 2011). The social equality motives were primarily aimed at creating equal opportunities and good care situations for all children, regardless of the family’s economic situation, visible in reforms such as universal childcare allowance and an extensive and affordable for all public day care system. The gender equality motive questioned the male breadwinner model and promoted a dual-earner/dual-carer model through different types of support for the reconciliation of work and family life, through reforms such as parental leave and ‘daddy quotas’ (Daly and Rake, 2003; Ellingsæter and Leira, 2011). As a consequence, gender equality has been regarded as part of the national identity of Sweden (Lundqvist and Roman, 2010). ¹ While these reforms have in some cases been successful, research shows a discrepancy between the political rhetoric and real-world experience (Anving, 2012; Grönlund, 2008). The failure to fully realize the dual-earner/dual-carer model has spurred various political initiatives over the years, one of which is to subsidize domestic care services for households. Initially the idea was met with scepticism, as privately employed domestic workers were considered very un-Swedish and as belonging to ‘a clear and visible class society with masters and maids in people’s homes’, a society that was seen as having been abolished in Sweden by the social democratic welfare system (Kvist, 2013: 215). But in 2007, and inspired by the general trend within the European Union of promoting markets for domestic services (Morel, 2015), the Conservative/Liberal government introduced the RUT tax deduction that allows purchasers of domestic services to deduct a proportion of the labour costs. Apart from being motivated by arguments of gender equality, the reform was also framed as an initiative to create jobs for ‘poorly educated persons and groups with low employment opportunities, such as immigrant women, and provide them with a gateway to the labour-market’ (Kvist and Peterson, 2010: 193).

The deduction has led to considerable growth in the formal market for paid domestic services, especially in the cleaning sector (Gavanas, 2013; Calleman and Gavanas, 2013; Kvist, 2013; The Swedish Tax Agency, 2017), but, in addition, a completely new market for nanny services has been established. Parallel to this, another, less formal, market has emerged: au pairs. As in the neighbouring countries of Norway and Denmark (Bikova, 2010; Liversage et al., 2013; Stenum, 2010), families in Sweden are increasingly employing au pairs from all over the world (Calleman, 2010; Platzer, 2010). Although their working conditions differ in some ways, ² nannies and au pairs both represent groups that are performing paid care work primarily centred on children in the private setting of a family home, including, for example, getting children ready for school and day care in the morning, picking them up and spending time with them in the afternoon and evening, as well as attending to different household tasks. Given the relatively high cost, domestic services including nannies and au pairs, is a realistic choice only for a well-off group of middle-class families; the RUT deduction is primarily used by households with a high economic standard of living (Halldén and Stenberg, 2014; The Swedish Tax Agency, 2017).

We argue that the recent developments in Sweden attest to a shift in politics, policy, discourses and practice regarding family and parenthood, but this shift comes from another policy area than what is commonly thought of as regulating the lives of families. Swedish family politics are still, by and large, promoting both social and gender equality (Lundqvist, 2015). The challenge is instead coming through the new possibilities for doing family enabled by tax politics, through the possibilities of hiring domestic services in general, and nannies and au pairs in particular. This change is less visibly framed as an intervention in families, while it indeed, as we will show in this article, has affected and changed both discourses and practices for doing care and family in well-off, dual-career families in Sweden.

Theoretical points of departure

To analyse current care regimes in Sweden, the ‘local’ levels of everyday arrangements of care needs to be in focus: through this, the complex and contradictory ways in which politics, policies and discourses are played out and being re-formulated, in everyday practices of doing care and family, will emerge. The ‘local care loops’ orchestrated by parents in everyday life, entail and enable different movements, both for themselves and for the other actors involved, that is, the nannies, au pairs and the children (Näre and Isaksen, this issue; Sheller and Urry, 2006). As argued by Näre and Wide (this issue), care loops are the ‘daily choreographies’ organizing actors’ movements in time and place. To fully capture how this is making possible a certain kind of family, a family practice perspective is necessary (Morgan, 1996, 2011); by conceptualizing family as something constituted in and through ‘doings’, rather than being defined through the noun of The Family, this perspective enables a focus on a ‘what appears to be trivial or even meaningless activities’ which are ‘given meaning through being grouped together under one single label, that of family’, as well as on everyday activities ‘which seem unremarkable, hardly worth talking about’ (Morgan, 2011: 5–7). When conditions for doing family changes, for example, through the hiring of a domestic worker, we can assume that the content of ‘family’ can change as well.

In congruence with this, our understanding of care also put emphasis on everyday mundane and taken-for-granted activities. While the feminist analytic division of care into labour/emotion (Finch and Groves, 1983; Graham, 1983) served important purposes at its instigation, it is insufficient in capturing the full complexity of care as emotional activity (Tronto, 1993). Conceptualizing care as a sentient activity (Mason, 1996) enables us to make visible the ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’ activities that actors need to engage in when being in care situations. We also conceptualize care as an activity taking place in situations: care is not (only) done to an actor but is rather created and enabled within relationships (Graham, 1983), something which necessitates the inclusion of children’s perspectives on care (Brannen et al., 2000; Eldén, 2013). Care is further traditionally gendered and especially so the sentient care activities (Balbo, 1987; DeVault, 1991): these are doings that women are assumed to ‘just know’ and ‘do’, in many instances invisible, often even to the ones doing it themselves. We ask in this article what is happening to understandings and experiences of care, in the local care loops when parts of care for children are delegated to ‘other’ women, in the form of nannies and au pairs (Hill Collins, 1998).

This, in turn, leads us into conceptualizations of care within research that has focused specifically on paid domestic care work, in the framework of global care chains. This strand of research has also made use of the division of care as labour and emotion (Anderson, 2000) and highlighted the function this division has in paid domestic work, through the imagined distinction between different care activities, where some are seen as ‘menial’ and some as ‘spiritual’ (Roberts, 1997). These dichotomies play a crucial role in assumptions reproduced especially by employers, that the labour part of care can be bought as a service on the market, while the emotion part can be ‘kept’ by the employing party: ‘spiritual’ housework is ‘valued highly because it is thought to be essential to the proper functioning of the household and the moral upbringing of children’, while ‘menial’ housework is ‘devalued because it is strenuous and unpleasant and is thought to require little moral or intellectual skill’ (Roberts, 1997: 51). This division is further inherently raced and classed: spiritual care is associated with ‘privileged white women’ and menial care with ‘minority, immigrant, and working-class women’ (Roberts, 1997: 51). As we will see in the analysis, these assumptions emerge when Swedish parents legitimize the organizing of local care loops, but these assumptions diverge significantly from the experience of being in care situations, as narrated by nannies/au pairs and children.

Study and methods

The point of departure for this article is the research project Care for children in an era of private market service (RJ P13-0603:1), with the overarching aim of analysing the practice of doing care and family in families who hire nannies and au pairs. To grasp the complexity of this practice, we have interviewed participating actors from all categories involved: nannies/au pairs (n = 26), parents (n = 29) and children (n = 19). ³ The nannies and au pairs were the first to be interviewed, followed by parents and finally, children. The nannies were primarily accessed through nanny companies, and the au pairs through member-only au pair groups on Facebook. The parents were primarily accessed either through snowballing on behalf of the nannies and au pairs, or through Facebook groups placing ads for au pairs, and the children were accessed through their parents. ⁴

We met with 11 nannies and 15 au pairs between the ages of 18 and 29 years. Taken together, they relate their experiences from working in 59 families. Eight nannies were born and raised in Sweden; three nannies came from Germany, Finland and Lithuania. The au pairs came from different countries: seven were from within Europe (from Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Estonia and Lithuania) and eight from outside of Europe (from Ukraine, Taiwan, the United States, the Philippines and Macedonia). We also met with and interviewed 28 parents: 19 mothers and 9 fathers. All participating parents were working full time in demanding careers and told of partners doing the same, in professions such as physician, lawyer, economist and CEO. Their incomes (and sometimes assets) placed them in the upper middle-class strata in Sweden. The parents had children between the ages of 6 months and 14 years, and the number of children in each family varied between one and four. Together, the families had experience of hiring 83 nannies and au pairs over the years. Nineteen children aged between 5 and 14 years old, with – all together – experience of being taken care of by around 80 nannies and au pairs, were also interviewed in this study.

The majority of both the nannies and the au pairs had middle-class backgrounds, and most were engaged in, or had already obtained, a university degree. Still the class position of nannies and au pairs is lower than that of the employing parents, and there is an ethnic/migratory tendency in the data. ⁵

The main focus in the interviews was everyday care practices. In the interviews with nannies and au pairs, to further encourage and help them relate this, we asked them to write a care diary (Bolger et al., 2003). With a similar ambition, in the encounters with the participating children, we offered the possibility to engage in drawing activities, through a ‘draw-your-day’ exercise (Eldén, 2013), encouraging the child to ‘draw and talk’ about everyday events and practices, combined with the tool of concentric circles of closeness (Mason and Tipper, 2008; Smart et al., 2001).

In the analysis, we have used different tools: extensive field notes in connection to each interview; repeated readings of transcriptions, looking especially for accounts indicating tensions, discrepancies, hesitation and so on, as care doings are often invisible even to the ones doing them and often lack an adequate language (DeVault, 1991: 228; Macdonald, 2010: 212); and coding and then reducing the data into themes.

Gender equality and good parenting: new classed ways of doing family

The hiring of nannies and au pairs are reproducing inequalities between different families. This is done through a re-formulation of the strong Swedish discourse of gender equality, and also, through the formulation of new ideals for ‘good parenting’.

The primary users of domestic services in general, and nanny and au pair care in particular, are to be found in upper middle-class families in Sweden. Our data also points towards another common characteristic: both mothers and fathers in our study are pursuing demanding careers in professions that require high levels of engagement of both time and energy. While it most probably is common to hire nannies and au pairs in more clearly identified upper-class families, where women more often downplay their ambitions to pursue careers (compare Aarseth, 2014), our study attests to the practice becoming a more widespread and acceptable solution for the solving of the ‘jigsaw-puzzle of life’, ⁶ as the managing of work and family life is popularly called in Sweden, for dual-earner couples. Talk about gender equality plays an important role here, in legitimating the practice. The discourse of gender equality was a primary motivation by the political proponents of the RUT tax deduction (Kvist and Peterson, 2010), and this argument is reproduced with emphasis by the parents in our study. The parent Elvira, for example, calls RUT a ‘gender equality reform’ and says that the possibility for her and her husband to ‘utilize the RUT services’ makes them ‘kind of live in a gender equal relationship, because the RUT services compensate for his absence’. The parents are well aware of the ‘risk’ of slipping into traditional gender roles when children are born. In the words of Leif,

Importantly, all of the parents participating in this study have had their children in public day care institutions in addition to hiring nannies and au pairs. As the vast majority of Swedish parents, they have great confidence in day care facilities and valued highly the ‘social training’ children encounter there. ⁷ The ‘giving up’ of one’s career that Leif is mentioning is not – as in some other national contexts – a retraction from the labour market as a whole, rather, it is based on the assumption that the kind of careers that mothers and fathers in our study intend to pursue demand more and other care arrangements than what the public day care facilities can offer. ⁸ Thus, the parents are wholeheartedly affirming an ideal of gender equality in terms of creating the possibility for the mother in the couple to pursue a career as demanding as the father. In this sense, the parents can be seen as contesting the discourse of gender equality as an ideal of dual-earner/dual-carer families and affirming a dual-earner/privately outsourced carer ideal. The economic backdrop – the fact that only well-off families can afford this arrangement and the fact that it is indeed relying on someone else, someone in a less economically safe situation, to step in and take on the care work – becomes overshadowed by the success of fulfilling the dual-earner part. As several mothers in our study argue, through being career women, they show to their children that other femininity ideals, beyond the traditionally caring woman, are possible.

The solving of the jigsaw-puzzle of life through the hiring of nannies and au pairs also entails the possibility of new ways of ‘doing good parenting’ (Dermott, 2016). Research has identified tendencies of ‘intense’ parenting emerging among the middle classes in recent decades, where parents are increasingly expected to be involved in and responsible for making the right choices on behalf of their children, to optimize their time and ensure successful futures (Hays, 1996; Lareau, 2003; Sparrman et al., 2016). ‘Good parenting’ is closely connected to the possibility of creating a ‘stress-free’ family life (Aarseth, 2014; Bach, 2014). In our interviews with parents, this is strongly linked to the hiring of nannies and au pairs, expressed in talk about ‘quality time’. The underlying idea for making quality time possible is the division of care as containing ‘menial’ and ‘spiritual’ parts (Roberts, 1997), and the possibility of delegating the menial parts to the nanny/au pair. The parents are very concerned with not letting their intense working life affect the children’s well-being. Having a nanny or an au pair taking care of everyday care, especially the ‘critical moments’ of getting ready and leaving for day care in the morning, as well as picking up from day care in the afternoon, makes the family more ‘harmonious’, as Tomas says,

Hiring nannies and au pairs is reducing stress both for parents and children, according to the parents. By delegating or reducing the mundane everyday care activities, the time the parents spend together with their children becomes more qualitative. Ingrid, for example, contrasts the care activity of giving a child a bath on a daily basis, something that she delegates to the au pair, to the quality time she has with the child, doing the same care activity of giving them a bath, but now ‘in a relaxed and enjoyable way’ on the weekend. This becomes a time ‘you share’ together when you do not have to ask your children to hurry up but can let them ‘play in the tub for half an hour if they want’, she says. The same activity can, thus, be seen as a ‘spiritual’ doing performed by the parent, as a crucial part of being a good parent, and as a ‘menial’ doing, performed by the nanny or the au pair, a necessary but not in the same way seen as a ‘relationship-building’ activity as when carried out by the parent.

The emphasis the parents in our study put on reducing everyday stress, conflicts and ‘mundanity’ points, we argue, towards new and emerging ideals of ‘good parenting’. As studies in other settings have shown, similar ideals are indeed affirmed by many parents (Bach, 2014; Cardell, 2015; Christensen, 2002), although few have the possibility of realizing it (Alsarve et al., 2017). As care is in a fundamental way building and sustaining relationships (Mason, 1996), the delegation of the – thought to be – menial care can be assumed to affect the relationships between parents and children. There are reasons to critically examine what this ideal of parenting will lead to, when everyday mundane care activities and conflicts are diminished and are being replaced by ideals of parenting as something that is best enacted in ‘good times’, as we argue elsewhere (Eldén and Anving, 2019). In addition, as we will show shortly, the actual care situations that children find themselves in, but now together with nannies and au pairs, still entail elements of stress and conflict.

In conclusion, the possibilities for some well-off families of orchestrating care loops that realize ideals of gender equality and good and ‘stress-free’ parenting are creating a situation where the ideals can be reproduced, while the underlying economic preconditions remain hidden. All families struggle to create ‘good’ care situations while sustaining work–family balance and gender equality, but the solution of hiring nannies and au pairs – that indeed seems to be working very well for the families in our study – are only available to some.

Invisible care: nannies, au pairs and children doing (the traditional) family

The hiring of nannies and au pairs are not only making possible the realizing of a certain kind of gender equal stress-free family; this enterprise is dependent upon reproduction of inequalities within the ‘doing of family’. Previous research in the framework of global care chains have illuminated the ways in which the structural positions of domestic workers, related primarily to their migratory status and class position, makes them especially susceptible of exploitation by other actors, primarily in relation to employing parents (Anderson, 2000; Bikova, 2017; Lutz, 2011) but also, according to some researchers, in relation to children (Spyrou, 2009; Tronto, 2002). While this may be the case, our study has pointed towards another dimension through which inequalities are reproduced at the core of the everyday care practice. When care loops entail the hiring of domestic services, it gives parents great possibilities of organizing the time and place for care, also of other actors, as they themselves are often absent (Tronto, 2002). This entails different understandings and expectations of care on the part of the parents, which are not corresponding well with the actual experiences of the other actors involved in the actual care situation: the nannies, au pairs and children.

The expectations of what nanny and au pair care should be are, as we argued above, relying heavily on the possibility of dividing up care into ‘manageable blocks of time’ (Tronto, 2002: 44), and into menial and spiritual doings, and of parents’ option of delegating some of the menial tasks. This idea is reproduced in narratives of both parents and nannies and au pairs, in talk about the care tasks as being easy and clearly defined, visible in the expected care chores often being listed by parents, sometimes in writing, sometimes verbally, and containing clearly designated tasks such as ‘pick up from childcare’, ‘prepare dinner’, ‘iron clothes’. ‘It’s a job with lots of freedom’, as the father Samuel expresses it, and ‘she can choose for herself’ when during the day she wants to carry out her chores, as the mother Nelly says. Nannies and au pairs too reproduce this image of the work, in explicitly naming it ‘easy’ and ‘free’, especially in their first response to our request for them to describe their regular working day. ‘It’s not hard’, the au pair Caroline replies and continues,

But when asked to give more detailed accounts about their actual experiences of everyday care practices the nannies’ and au pairs’ characterization of ‘easy’ tasks come out as considerably more complex. Caroline again, describing the same activity of taking children to day care later on in the interview,

The nannies’ and au pairs’ narratives of actual practices – of their experiences of being in care situations with the children in their care – are full of descriptions of emotional activities, of what Jennifer Mason (1996) has labelled sentient activity. Building on Tronto (1993), Mason argues that the feminist analytical division of care into labour (care for) and emotion (care about) (Graham, 1983) is wrongly assuming the former to be an activity, while the latter is conceptualized as a ‘state-of-being’. Care, Mason argues, entails emotional activities, such as ‘attending to, noticing, hearing, being attuned to, seeing’ the needs, likes, dislikes and relationships of specific others, and/or, ‘thinking through, working out, organizing, planning, orchestrating relationships between oneself and others’, and/or, ‘relationships between others’ (Mason, 1996: 27). When Caroline is describing the ‘leaving-at-day care’ situation, the doing of the ‘simple’ chore is proving to be highly dependent on a lot of sentient activities on her part. She has to handle the emotional outburst of the child, as well as his actual physical refusal of going into the day care centre. To be able to read, and solve, the situation, she has to have knowledge about this particular child, she has to interpret his behaviour and think through and come up with a solution that takes into consideration not only her own relationship with the child but also his – and her – relationship with the parents. In addition to diverging from the image of the practice as ‘easy’, Caroline’s experience in the care situation – described to us further on in the interview – is also intervened by her worries of her thought-to-be appropriate solutions not being approved of by the parents. While the care situation in Caroline’s mind seems to require a certain action – in the case of the leaving at day care centre drama, for example, she wants to solve the situation by bringing him back home with her – she feels very unsure of what the parents expect of her, of whether she can act in the way she thinks is necessary.

The nannies’ and au pairs’ narratives attest to the inadequacy of the division of care into labour and emotion, or spiritual and menial and testifies of the actual complex and emotional practices that are required in a care situation, at least if they are to be considered good. This image is also confirmed in the narratives told to us by children. The perspectives of children being taken care of by nannies and au pairs have been missing, with a few notable exceptions (Souralová, 2013, 2015, 2017; Spyrou, 2009). In her study of Vietnamese immigrant children and their Czech nannies, Adéla Souralová (2015) shows how the daily mundane presence of nannies form the basis of the development of relationships characterized by mutuality, reciprocity and emotion. Souralová calls for the importance of recognizing the possibilities of close and mutual relationships also developing in paid private childcare. Our study confirms this and shows that by including children’s narratives, previously identified tensions in domestic care worker’s narratives can be understood more clearly, as the contours of the specific care situation that nannies/au pairs and children engage in together becomes clear.

The narratives of the children in our study show that children expect close, specific, reciprocal and mutual relationships to develop between themselves and the nannies and au pairs being hired to care for them. They also show, affirming Souralová (2015), that these relationships are developed in and through everyday mundane care situations. Children tell about a constant presence of the nannies and au pairs, of them being there ‘always’, ‘doing everything’ and how this creates an atmosphere of them feeling safe. The children also clearly delineate that a mere carrying out of ‘chores’ on the part of the nanny/au pair is not enough: to be good she has to show, in and through her doings, that the child is special to her. Children see, and express their expectation of, ‘specialness’ in different ways: in the nannies’/au pairs’ willingness to play with them and talk to them about things that matter to the child, when nannies/au pairs, through their doings, prove to the child that she knows what the child likes through initiating pleasurable activities such as baking, or preparing the child’s favourite food, or when the nanny/au pair occasionally crosses boundaries set by the parents, for example, through inviting the child to the nannies’/au pairs’ private sphere. When nannies and au pairs do this, they show that they are there for the child. They notice the child, they interpret his or her needs, likes and modes, and to do this, they need to have knowledge about the particular child and have the ability and possibility of acting out of this knowledge (Mason, 1996). When they do not do it, when the care situation becomes just a performing of chores, it is not good, according to the children. For example, 12-year-old Karl, like all children in our sample who has experiences of being cared for by several nannies and au pairs, reflects on the different ways in which nannies and au pairs are present in his life,

In Karl’s view, the good au pairs ‘did a lot’ together with him and his siblings, but others seemed uninterested and did just the bare minimum: they performed the chores the parents had asked them to but never engaged with Karl and his siblings.

Children’s expectations of emotional engagement and closeness also come through strongly in narratives of forming and breaking up relationships to nannies and au pairs. ⁹ Children’s accounts of nannies/au pairs leaving are full of emotions and mostly negative ones, of being sad, crying and not really understanding why she had to quit. Ludwig, for example, an 11-year-old boy whose au pair recently left is trying to come to terms with his new situation.

Experiences of getting to know and having to say good bye to several nannies and au pairs makes the children develop strategies to shield themselves from emotional harm. Children talk about trying to ‘hold back’ and not engage when new nannies and au pairs arrive. But this position turns out to be very difficult to hold on to in the long run. For care situations to be good, emotional engagement seems to be inevitable.

Drawing on the work of Majorie DeVault (1991), we argue that the sentient activities nannies and au pairs do in the care situation – explicitly expected by the children and felt as necessary by the nannies and au pairs themselves to create a good care situation ¹⁰ – are the same kind of doings that have been (and still are) carried out by wives and mothers in producing family life (DeVault, 1991: 4, 13). It is activities that are invisible: while being a significant and necessary part of doing care, often demanding and gruelling, it is rarely acknowledged and often underestimated, even by the people who are themselves doing it (Anving, 2012; DeVault, 1991). Through its invisibility, gendered inequalities are reproduced: women are expected to ‘just know’ and do these demanding activities (Balbo, 1987; Graham, 1983; Waerness, 1984).

When these care doings are carried out by nannies and au pairs, the sentient activity parts become even more invisible. The nannies and au pairs are entering into a role that at the outset relies heavily on the dichotomies of labour/emotion and menial/spiritual and their main contribution is thought to be in the labour/menial-part of the dichotomies. The parents reproduce this strongly, not least visible when care activities are valued differently depending on who is carrying it out: the same task can sometimes be framed as spiritual if done by a parent and menial when carried out by a nanny/au pair. As we have shown, the narratives of nannies, au pairs and children attest to this dichotomy being false: a thought-to-be menial activity is, in fact, inherently emotional. Thus, the discursive framing of the role of nanny/au pair work obscures the emotional activities they actually have to engage in to make the care situation good (DeVault, 1991: 228). The invisibility gets further enhanced by the fact that the underlying arrangement of them performing a ‘bought service’ ¹¹ makes sure that nannies and au pairs cannot make any claims on getting the status of ‘family’. While wives and mothers at least in some instances can gain a certain ‘status’ through their enterprise of sustaining the family, nannies and au pairs are always dependent on the family’s will to include them as ‘part-of-family’, and this position is – at least in the cases in our study – always temporary. In addition, the vulnerable structural position of nannies and au pairs identified by other scholars, related to migration/ethnicity and social class (Anderson, 2000; Bikova, 2017; Búriková and Miller, 2010; Macdonald, 2010; Stenum, 2010; Williams, 2012), makes the possibilities of drawing attention to the actual demanding emotional activities in the care situation even more unlikely (Eldén and Anving, 2019).

The practice of hiring nannies and au pairs enabled by the new possibilities of organizing everyday care loops are, thus, reproducing gendered inequalities within families in new but very familiar ways. When delegating the care work traditionally assigned to and performed by wives and mothers, the parents, and the nannies/au pairs, rely on an understanding of care that does not correspond with the actual practice of being in the care situation. In doing so, the emotional activities in which nannies and au pairs engage – demanding, gruelling but also engagements that can entail positive feelings of ‘knowing’ and being able to solve situations, and of closeness and love and, most importantly, necessary to create a good care situation – are becoming invisible. Gendered inequalities can thereby continue to be the invisible foundation of the doing of families.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our study shows that inequalities related to class, gender and ethnicity are characterizing new local care loops emerging in Sweden. The driving forces are to be found on a macro level, in processes of globalization, and political and policy changes, but the consequences are only visible – and to its character, hard to make visible, as all forms of care – in everyday interactions in the local micro-mobilities taking place in the setting of the home, within families. Through including and analysing narratives of all actors involved in this practice, and especially the perspectives of the children, we have been able to point towards substantial ways in which Swedish ‘core values’ of equality are being challenged and re-formulated.

We see that the previously strongly held ideals of gender and social equality are being challenged. While Swedish family politics are still enforcing a dual-earner/dual-carer family through generic welfare services available for all, changes in other policy areas – most specifically in tax policies – make possible and create new practices for doing ‘good’ and gender equal family life for some: for those with economic means. In doing so, a discursive move is detectable, establishing gender equality more firmly as a ‘dual earner’ enterprise (Carbin et al., 2017; Gunnarsson, 2013), making equal sharing of care less important and giving up on the possibility of engaging fathers in everyday care (Halldén and Stenberg, 2014).

As we have argued, the sentient activity parts of care are always hard to detect (DeVault, 1991; Mason, 1996), but the specific character of nanny/au pair care obscures it further. The complex and necessary emotional activities within care come through strongly in the narratives of everyday care situations told to us by children, nannies and au pairs. This stands in sharp contrast to the discursive labelling of care as something that can be divided into manageable blocks of time and parted into ‘menial’ and ‘spiritual’ dimensions, reproduced by the parents, and corresponding well with Swedish politics of the recent decades.

The parent’s realizing of gender equality and ‘good’ and stress-free parenting is, thus, relying heavily on the reproduction of very traditional gendered doings, but here, done by ‘other’ women. These women, in turn, are increasingly dependent upon a precarious working sector, characterized by assumptions of who is best suited for these kinds of jobs, marked at the outset by class and ethnicity. If this way of organizing local care loops becomes more common among the economically privileged, a tendency that indeed seems to be prevalent, there are reasons to believe that inequalities at the core of the practice of doing care will continue to be invisible, and that the practices of doing family among Swedish families will increasingly reproduce unequal opportunities for realizing ‘good care’ situations and gender equality between families.