At our conference on Women, Home and
Work a fortnight ago, speaker Jonas Himmelstrand said the Swedish
day-care model should not be followed by other countries because it
is failing both children and parents in his country.

An article in The Irish Times yesterday
defended the ‘Nordic Model’ without really addressing the
arguments against it.

In defence of that model, The Irish
Times piece cited studies showing that Scandinavian countries
“consistently fare among the best internationally on all the
indicators of children’s wellbeing”.

However, those indicators are almost
invariably to do with child poverty and Jonas was happy to admit that
in this respect Sweden does fare very well.

But the two authors of The Irish Times’
article (lecturers Dympna Devine and Ursula Kilkelly) ignored the
fact that in other respects Swedish children do much less well. For
example, Swedish children are sliding down the world educational
tables and Jonas cited studies showing that mental ill-health is
increasing among Swedish children.

But the very biggest flaw in the
article was its unquestioned assumption that all women want to go out
to work and therefore to leave their children in State-subsidised
day-care.

Of course, if this is what all women
want, then the Swedish model is ideal, but it is emphatically not
what all women want, not even in Sweden.

Another of our speakers, Dr Catherine
Hakim of the London School of Economics, and one of the world’s
leading experts on the subject of women, home and work, has shown
that the vast majority of women are not career-oriented.

She cited studies showing that about
20pc of women are career-orientated, 20pc are home-orientated and the
rest are somewhere in between.

Sweden is only the model to follow if
all women are mostly career-orientated. They are not and the fact
that the Swedish model pretends they are, and does not reflect the
plurality of opinion among women on this issue, means it is the very
last model we should follow because it is based on a false
assumption.

Instead, we should follow the Finnish
model which is much more neutral between home and work. The Swedish
system practically conscripts Swedish women into work and Swedish
children into day-care and that is simply wrong.

(P.S. Here’s a link to an article from March of this year in which a Swedish minister suggests that housewives are holding back European economic growth.)