The social care-taking of the city-kids. Determinants for day-care attendance in early twentieth century southern Sweden

Summary, in English

In this paper, we analyze one of the early welfare interventions in the Swedish welfare state targeted towards mothers and young children: the introduction of a child day-care system. Because quantitative research on day-cares in historical settings is generally scarce, in this study, we focus on the determinants of day-care enrollment in southern Sweden during the early twentieth century. We use unique longitudinal micro-level data for the city of Landskrona obtained from the Scanian Economic Demographic Database, which has been linked to individual-level records of day-care attendance for children born between1900 and 1935. Event-history techniques are employed to analyze the importance of factors such as household composition, parental socio-economic background, marital status of the mother, and mother’s occupation. Of the studied children, 8 percent were ever enrolled in daycares, most of them around the ages 3 to 6. The results show that the mother’s marital status, household SES, the presence of other adult females in the household and mother’s occupation are all significant determinants of day-care attendance for children. In this study, we
show that day-care attendance followed a negative SES gradient and was most common among children of single mothers, in the early twentieth century in southern Sweden.

• Author: Annika Elwert; Luciana Quaranta
• Department/s: Department of Economic History; Centre for Economic Demography
• Publishing year: 2022
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Lund Papers in Economic Demography
• Issue: 2022:1
• Links: https://www.ed.lu.se/media/ed/papers/working_papers/LPED%202022%201.pdf
• Document type: Working paper
• Topic: Economic History
• Status: Published