Fathering Practices in Sweden During the COVID-19: Experiences of Syrian Refugee Fathers

Abstract

This article explores fathering practices among Syrian refugee families in Sweden. Syrian refugees provide an example of people who migrated because of a single major event: the war in Syria. The article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on fathering practices. The Swedish COVID-19 strategy differed from those adopted in many other countries. Lockdowns were minimal and were not stringently enforced, based on the assumption that individuals would trust the authorities and would take personal responsibility for complying with their guidelines and recommendations. Previous research suggests that migrants and other vulnerable groups were not always well informed about the public policies introduced prior to and during the pandemic. The article draws on empirical data from a wider research project on the family lives of Syrian migrants in Sweden. The authors present their findings from an analysis of eleven ethnographically informed semi-structured interviews, carried out before and during the pandemic, with married fathers who had been living in Sweden for several years. In this article, they focus on three cases representing fathers with varied educational backgrounds and employment histories. These families had in common what are considered by Swedish standards to be overcrowded living conditions; they were forced to accept close family proximity, both physically and emotionally, as they no longer had the supportive networks they were used to in Syria. The three fathers were found to rely more heavily on information provided by the people with whom they were in contact in Sweden than on policies and recommendations from the authorities. These findings confirmed that the previous experiences among refugees of shifting policies regarding migration and integration had lowered their trust in government. They had learnt that they needed to rely on mutual dependency not only between spouses, but also between parents and children.

Untitled

“…The study is narrowly focused on young adult migrants living in Sweden and it is relevant to a multidimensional social resilience project that is an initiative of Lund University's 2030 agenda on research on social sustainability. Recent migrant studies conducted in Sweden cover a wide range of migrant-related issues, such as parenting practices (Wissö & Bäck-Wiklund, 2021;Baghdasaryan et al, 2021), housing (Stepanova & Romanov, 2021), education and work (Ahlgren & Rydell, 2020;Carlbaum, 2021;Messina Dahlberg et al, 2021), and integration (Eliassi, 2017;Lyck-Bowen, 2020). Though these studies cover a wide range of social issues relevant to migrants' lives in host countries, the choices of methods are limited to qualitative interviews and focus group discussions.…”

Reorganizations of Gendered Labor During the COVID‐19 Pandemic: A Review and Suggestions for Further Research

“…Recently published interview studies with immigrant Syrian fathers living in Sweden (Wissö and Bäck‐Wiklund 2021 ), new French fathers (Sponton 2021 ), and custodial single fathers in the United States (Iztayeva 2021 ) provide important insights for such analyses. In each case, fathers exhibited a diversity of responses to the pandemic as they navigated confluences of personal beliefs, familial compositions, state policies, and positions within classed and racialized labor markets.…”

The Impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic and Lockdown Policies on Young Fathers: Comparative Insights from the UK and Sweden

“…Research in the UK and Sweden has highlighted deepening social inequalities linked to policy and welfare related changes that have pushed more families into financial crisis and impacted on mental health (e.g. Bergnehr et al, 2021;Wissö and Bäck-Wiklund, 2021;Garthwaite et al, 2022).…”

“…As we argue elsewhere, and noted in a wider body of scholarship (Esping-Andersen, 1990;Kaufman, 2018), the welfare and family policy systems of the UK and Sweden already differed markedly before the pandemic. Where Sweden's 'dual-earner, dual-carer family policy' (Björnberg, cited in Wissö and Bäck-Wiklund, 2021) approach embeds effective state support for working parents through a combination of paid parental leave, accessible public childcare, and paid leave to support care for sick children (Wissö and Bäck-Wiklund, 2021), the UK welfare system represents a cluster of countries that adhere to the twin ideologies of reduced government and neoliberalism and individual responsibility/freedom. These differences have implications for young fatherhood, both in terms of the framing of young parenthood and the extent to which young parents can secure the resources they need to support their families (Andreasson et al, 2022).…”

“…While the responses of the UK and Swedish governments to the COVID-19 pandemic differed over time, these countries have reportedly had among the worst per-capita COVID-19 mortality rates in Europe (Mishra et al, 2021). Where the UK government first imposed a national lockdown with mandatory measures in March 2020, that placed stringent restrictions on its citizens 2 , Sweden's early policies represented a more laissez-faire approach, relying predominantly on individual responsibility, voluntary compliance with government rules, information sharing and an expectation of trust in authorities (Bylund and Packard, 2021;Wissö and Bäck-Wiklund, 2021). This placed it 'on the periphery of the global spotlight' (Lindelle, 2021: 75).…”