Last Friday - the 21st of January - I happened to stumble upon a piece on SVT, the national publicly-funded news station. There was a piece on how children are now living in joint-custody arrangements, whereby they spend half their time in one parent's home and the other half in the other parents. The piece featured 2 women who were living together in a 'commune' of sorts, with 2 bedrooms where one lived with her children when they were visiting. My understanding of the piece is that the women were not romantically involved. One of the women (presumably semi-famous) talked about how we need to accept new family situations, that it was not a destruction of the family but rather a creation of a new family model. In the piece was also a man who talked about how he and his new live-in woman have a similar arrangement, since they have children from another marriage.
After the piece there was a person who spoke - it was claimed she was a researcher and she had some statistics to share. It also turned out that she also lived in a similar situation, being a divorcee herself (or at the very least that she had children with a man with whom she used to live but does not live with any more).
As for the statistics themselves, there was nothing remarkable. She claimed that children who live with both biological parents tend to do better than children who live with only one biological parent all the time, and that children who live in joint-custody arrangements tend to do better than children who have access to only one parent, but not as well as children living with 2 parents. This is about as ringing an endorsement of the family as you will ever have on Swedish media. There was no discussion on marriage and whether children who are raised by parents united in marriage are better off than others. In Sweden, co-habitation and marriage are seen largely as the same thing - with marriage having the dubious distinction of being an arrangement with practically no benefits in law but many downsides.
If the piece had ended there I would not have bothered to comment on it. However, the researcher received a question though on why joint-custody rates vary so much between countries. Then she went on about how it all has to do with different views on women's equality with men, and views on whether women should be in the workplace. In other words, according to her, it all had to do with feminism, and women's 'progress' in the workplace and society at large.
I found that very odd since I would have assumed that as someone who researches on the well-being of children, her natural inclination would have been to say something akin to "different cultures have different views on how best to raise children", or "different countries have different views on the centrality of children in social policies". Make no mistake: What we are talking about primarily here is children - because it is they who have to be uprooted and displaced every now and then -, but according to her, even when we are discussion the well-being of children, they only come third in consideration after 'equality' in the households and 'equality' in the workplace.
Of course, for Sweden, the most important factor in joint-custody relationships is not men wanting to take care of their children, but rather the fact that in a joint-custody relationship the man does not have to pay alimony to the mother of his children - which is a rather big attraction given that most people don't want to offer material support to people they might have liked previously but now despise. This aspect did not feature in her analysis though, which is strange. Given the frequency with which unborn children are killed in Sweden, and given the fact that many people have children with multiple partners while clearly not intending to commit to them, it is fair to say that Swedes are generally not the most child-loving or child-centrered people, so a good researcher might be curious to explain why men in such a society choose joint-custody solutions. Maybe she has, but it didn't show. I was left with the impression that her research was by and large driven by a desire to rationalise her own divorce and subsequent lifestyle choices.
In the final analysis though, it is plain to see that feminism and leftism are the lenses through which all political discourse takes place in Sweden. It would be difficult otherwise to explain how a piece which is clearly about children ends up being an analysis of women's 'progress' in society.
