Attitudes promoting “intensive parenting” are prevalent in many countries and are associated with mothering and class privilege. Are intensive parenting attitudes widespread and similarly classed in Sweden, which has historically shifted burdens off parents and reduced inequalities? Using the 2021 Generations and Gender Survey, descriptive and latent class analyses identified predominant patterns of intensive parenting attitudes and sociodemographic predictors among Swedes. Moderate population-level agreement with measures of intensive parenting attitudes obscured subgroup variability in intensive parenting profiles and a reversed relationship with class. About half of respondents, disproportionately younger, foreign-born, and female, belonged to concordant latent classes that strongly or moderately subscribed to intensive parenting attitudes. Another third belonged to a discordant class dominated by older, Swedish-born, class-advantaged respondents espousing certain aspects of intensive parenting attitudes in a distinct pattern not yet identified elsewhere. This dissonance in predominant parenting attitudes among Swedes may have interesting implications for norms and policies.

Armed conflict has been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes, with long-term negative health effects for current and future generations. This study analyzes birthweight in Colombia, where a long-standing conflict has created multiple stressors that may impair maternal and child health, including high levels of conflict mortality and anti-coca fumigation. We analyze births in 2000–2016 using Demographic and Health Survey data from 2004/2005, 2009/2010 and 2015/2016, which identified women's births in the last five years, combined with monthly information about local organized violence and anti-coca fumigation. Fixed effects models account for the mother's characteristics and pregnancy-related factors. We assess both main effects and heterogeneous effects according to the mother's level of education, exposure during different trimesters and at two levels of spatial aggregation, as well as the compounding risks of being exposed to both violence and fumigation. Our study shows that local exposure to organized violence during pregnancy is detrimental to intrauterine growth, resulting in lower birthweight. More localized exposure to fumigation was not significantly related to birthweight, potentially due to the low share of sampled women being exposed and selection into live birth. However, exposure measured at more aggregated levels significantly predicted reduced intrauterine growth. These within-family effects are particularly strong among less educated mothers. Further, our findings suggest compounding risks of exposure to both hazards. The findings indicate a scarring effect from armed conflict on newborns that may impair their future health and socioeconomic status outcomes. The results highlight the critical role that context plays in shaping individual health outcomes and the importance of intersectional approaches in future research and interventions.

Research on how climate affects conceptions is limited and often constrained by data limitations. Additionally, scientific knowledge is typically based on research focused on very poor or wealthy settings. Here, we examine two middle-income and climate-sensitive contexts, Armenia and Tajikistan, and use finely detailed data on local weather conditions and all conceptions, including those not ending in a live birth. We fit fixed-effects linear probability models of the time until each conception using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, stratified by educational level and urban/rural residence. No relationship appears between heat and conceptions in Armenia or between rainfall and conceptions in either context. In contrast, exposures to higher-than-usual temperatures and hot days are associated with a lower probability of conception in rural Tajikistan. This finding persists when examining all conceptions and only those resulting in a live birth. Further, the results do not vary by women’s educational attainment nor by being childless or not. As such, we do not find evidence that specific groups of women are more vulnerable to climate variability beyond those living in rural (versus urban) areas. Given the broad impact of heat on conceptions in rural Tajikistan, differences in how individuals engage with the urban and rural environments may be important in the short-term relationship between climate and conceptions.

Given concerns that the intensification of parenting could have negative consequences for well-being, this paper explores whether intensive parenting is associated with parents' self-rated health in the case of Sweden, where extensive parental supports may provide protection. We apply binary logistic regression models to responses from 3400 parents in the nationally representative Swedish Generations and Gender Survey from 2021. Results differ depending on whether we use a variable-centered or person-centered approach to measuring intensive parenting. The variable-centered analysis showed that only certain intensive parenting attitudes, mainly within the challenging dimension, predict negative self-rated health, and this only applies to mothers. Using latent class analysis to group respondents by their overall attitude profiles around intensive parenting, the person-centered approach revealed that associations between intensive parenting attitude profiles and self-rated health differed substantially by gender. Although very few differences were observed according to the strength of intensive parenting attitudes or by agreeing with only certain dimensions, the respondents’ predicted probabilities of rating their own health as good or very good differed for those who reject intensive parenting versus adhering to it at least in part. Mothers who reject intensive parenting have significantly higher probabilities of good health, whereas fathers who reject intensive parenting have significantly lower probabilities of good health.

Increased gender equality in the labor market and the home are both cited as stabilizers to income inequality between households, but shifts in the economic organization of families over the life course instead appear to amplify household income inequality. Using the case of Sweden, where men have taken longer parental leave in recent years and the age at parenthood continues to advance, we analyze between-family income inequality for couples with a young child. Based on income data from population registers, we decompose how changes in family dynamics, pre- and postparenthood, contributed to income inequality in families with children between the years 1995 and 2018. Analyses show no evidence that assortative mating has increased and that a minor decline in inequality between couples over this 24-year period resulted from two opposing trends: Dis-equalizing changes related to women's postbirth income advancements were eclipsed by equalizing changes related to the postponement of parenthood. Postbirth income trends reveal how between-family inequality increased through women's income development and decreased through men's. Our findings confirm the importance of family processes to household inequality and show the complex effects of both changes in the timing of parenthood and improved gender equality.

Background: The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths differed across countries and across waves of the pandemic. Patterns also differed between groups within a country.

Objective: We combine data on excess mortality with data on cause-of-death-specific mortality in the case of Sweden to identify which groups had excess mortality beyond what can be captured by analyses of COVID-19-specific deaths. We also explore the possibility that some groups may have benefited in terms of reduced all-cause mortality, potentially due to home-centered living conditions during the pandemic.

Methods: We produced and compared three sets of group-specific incidence rates: deaths from (1) any cause in 2020, (2) any cause in 2019, (3) any cause excluding COVID-19 in 2020. We compared rates across different socioeconomic profiles based on combinations of sex, age, marital status, education, and country of birth.

Contribution: We show that many of those who died during 2020 would not have done so in the absence of the pandemic. We find some evidence of COVID-19 mortality underestimation, mainly among individuals with a migration background. We also found groups for which mortality decreased during the pandemic, even when including COVID-19 mortality. Progression across the first and second waves of the pandemic shows that more groups appeared to become protected over time and that there was less underestimation of COVID-19 mortality in the second part of 2020.

Many demographic challenges and new trends have been observed across formerly state socialist countries after embarking on their political and economic transition. Including countries that range from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, this study explores whether some family-related events were more sensitive to the transformation that occurred in the 1990s than others, and whether the disruption was immediate or delayed across this wide range of contexts. Based on year-specific hazard ratios over four decades, results point to changes in fertility patterns being clearly linked to the transition. Second birth rates reacted almost immediately to societal disruption, whereas a more delayed change occurred for first births. Although abrupt changes in marriage and divorce rates also occurred, these changes often began before the transition and therefore may be part of longer-term developments. That second births were the most sensitive family event to the immediate change in conditions may be due to economic costs, but also unique characteristics related both to its lack of conferring a new social role on the individual, such as in the case of marriage and parenthood, and the narrower window of time in which this event usually occurs. The delayed changes in first births may instead reflect changes in norms and culture that influenced younger individuals when they reached childbearing ages.

Objectives This is the first population-level study to examine inequalities in COVID-19 mortality according to working-age individuals' occupations and the indirect occupational effects on COVID-19 mortality of older individuals who live with them.

Methods We used early-release data for the entire population of Sweden of all recorded COVID-19 deaths from 12 March 2020 to 23 February 2021, which we linked to administrative registers and occupational measures. Cox proportional hazard models assessed relative risks of COVID-19 mortality for the working-aged population registered in an occupation in December 2018 and the older population who lived with them.

Results Among working aged-adults, taxi/bus drivers had the highest relative risk of COVID-19 mortality: over four times that of skilled workers in IT, economics, or administration when adjusted only for basic demographic characteristics. After adjusting for socioeconomic factors (education, income and country of birth), there are no occupational groups with clearly elevated (statistically significant) COVID-19 mortality. Neither a measure of exposure within occupations nor the share that generally can work from home were related to working-aged adults' risk of COVID-19 mortality. Instead of occupational factors, traditional socioeconomic risk factors best explained variation in COVID-19 mortality. Elderly individuals, however, faced higher COVID-19 mortality risk both when living with a delivery or postal worker or worker(s) in occupations that generally work from home less, even when their socioeconomic factors are taken into account.

Conclusions Inequalities in COVID-19 mortality of working-aged adults were mostly based on traditional risk factors and not on occupational divisions or characteristics in Sweden. However, older individuals living with those who likely cannot work from home or work in delivery or postal services were a vulnerable group.

Educational gradients in parental leave length are opposite for women and men: highly educated women return to work faster than those with low education while highly educated men are absent longer than less educated men. Explanations for the opposite gradients are typically made at the individual- or couple-level. To date, no quantitative study has documented whether the opposite educational gradients hold also within workplaces. In this study, we use employer-employee matched Swedish register data with fixed-effects models to examine whether the educational gradient applies also among co-workers in the same workplace. The results show that three-quarters of the educational effect typically attributed to the individual father disappeared when comparing fathers within workplaces. The educational gradient of mothers remained largely unchanged. These findings provide the first population-level evidence for the primacy of the workplace in determining fathers' care choices.

Co-residential partnerships are a pre-condition for childbearing and less time is spent in these unions when there is diffi-culty finding partners, a delay in union formation, and partnership instability. Our study explores patterns in co-residential partnerships across birth cohorts in 11 post-socialist countries to assess changes in the number of years spent in these partnerships and the patterns underlying any trend. Using the Harmonized Histories dataset, based on partnership data from generations and gender surveys, we calculate changes in co-residential union trends. In about half of the countries, the share of women who have not entered a co-residential union by age 30 increased, whereas the proportion still in their first union by this age decreased universally. The latter trend, reflecting union instability, pre-dates the transition from socialism. Delays in starting the first union were seen in only a few countries immediately after the transition began but more countries experienced union postponement in coming-of-age cohorts in the 2000s. A declining median age at first union in the former Soviet republics before and immediately after the transition from socialism balances the impact of increased union instability. Overall, the number of years spent in a co-residential union before age 30 declined across the Central and South-Eastern European countries, especially in Hungary. Union dynamics may have contributed to declining fertility in these countries. In contrast, little or no change in time spent in unions in the post-Soviet countries indicates that union dynamics were less likely to have influenced these women's fertility behavior.