Care biographies: Challenging narratives of declining intergenerational care within strong welfare states

Abstract

Strong welfare states are often assumed to be lacking in intergenerational family care engagements. This article challenges this narrative by putting conceptualisations of individualisation and autonomy into conversation with theories on relationality and care, relating this to biographical narratives of intergenerational care practices during the expansion of the Swedish welfare state. The research involves in-depth interviews with 63 informants spanning three generations – grandparents, adult children and grandchildren – exploring their lived experiences of care practices and relations across the lifespan. By employing Mason’s framework of relational layers, the study shows the complex nature of intergenerational engagements, suggesting the concept of sentient engagements as a lens through which to understand the increased importance of emotional activities of care in people’s everyday lives. By putting narratives of care at different points in time – the post-war era, the 1960s–1980s and the 2000s – against each other, the study highlights changing practical and sentient engagements. Particularly notable is the growing significance of grandparent–grandchild relationships, which emerge as crucial sites of support – but also ambivalence – in intergenerational care relations.

Introduction

Strong welfare states such as Sweden are often argued to be lacking in intergenerational family care engagements. Help, transfers and support between generations are assumed to decline, as a consequence of growth of extensive public and universal welfare state provision of care services, such as childcare and elderly care (see, for example, Berggren & Trägårdh, 2022; Carlson, 1990; Popenoe, 1991). This ‘conventional story of modernisation’ (Kohli, 1999, p. 81) has been strong in sociological theorising, and social democratic welfare states have been seen as epitomising modern individualised society, with changes in family relations depicted as particularly indicative of new intimacies, characterised by contingent, ‘pure’ and democratic ideals, and individuals striving towards autonomy and independence of traditional family bonds (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Bergsten & Bäck-Wiklund, 2010; Giddens, 1992). However, the empirical grounding of the individualisation thesis has come under question, particularly by family scholars (Aarseth, 2018; Bjerrum Nielsen, 2017; Brannen & Nilsen, 2005; Jamieson, 1999; Smart, 2007). Through her theory on Personal Life, Smart (2007, p. 28) has suggested a different point of departure for conceptualising today’s family relations, with a replacement of the concept of individual with personal: whereas individual implies ‘atomized or disconnected’ entities, ‘“[t]he personal” designates an area of life which impacts closely on people and means much to them, but which does not presume that there is an autonomous individual who makes free choices and exercises unfettered agency’. Related to this, conceptualisations of relationality (Holland et al., 2001; Nilsen, 2021; Qureshi & Metlo, 2021) have pointed towards the potential of re-writing the history of the modern autonomous individual by careful attention towards the ways in which people narrate their biographies.

This article contributes to this endeavour by putting narratives of care practices between generations in families, today and through the historical phase of the emerging Swedish welfare state, at the centre. With a point of departure in a set of biographical narratives of three generational groups – women and men of the post-war generation, their adult children and grandchildren – and through a theoretical and methodological lens of relational layers (Mason, 2004), I question the narrative of declining intergenerational care engagements in families, in the evolving welfare state. I suggest that a focus on care practices at different points in history brings specific and new insights into the understanding of intergenerational family engagements. By conceptualising care as entailing both practical and sentient activities (Mason, 1996), the study brings forward the increasing importance of sentient engagements and argues that these are no less impactful on intergenerational ties than economic and practical factors.

Research on strong welfare states and intergenerational engagements

With the aim of creating a society marked by social and gender equality, publicly funded social security provisions were introduced in Sweden, from the post-war period onwards (Lundqvist, 2011). Sweden and its neighbouring Nordic countries have been labelled ‘caring states’ (Leira, 1994), as their particular social democratic welfare model has been focused on the state’s responsibility of providing public and universal care, including, for example, extensive eldercare, paid parental leave, public childcare and childcare allowances. This has profoundly changed family, care and gender relations and practices. The major narrative has been that of increased individualisation, as the shift from family to state responsibilities in providing care has changed particularly women’s biographies and made them less bound to care responsibilities, and more economically and practically independent of patriarchal institutions.

Research on generational change in Nordic welfare societies has both confirmed and questioned assumptions of individualisation. A key empirical focus has been young people’s identities in transitions to adulthood (Bjerrum Nielsen, 2017; Brannen et al., 2002; Nilsen, 2024). These studies show how ‘normal biographies’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) evolve in relation to ideologies of personal choice and individualism. At the same time, they also show evidence questioning the assumptions of the ‘conventional story of modernisation’ (Kohli, 1999, p. 81), in relation to declining importance of intergenerational relations in strong welfare states. While not taking family and care as their explicit point of departure, these themes still run through the analysis, for example in Bjerrum Nielsen’s (2017) study of gender identities in three generations of Norwegian men and women during the 20th century. ¹ Focusing ‘emotional links’ in the informant’s narrating of the relationship to their parents, Bjerrum Nielsen (2017, pp. 283–288) shows how the view of declining importance of family relations is confirmed in the two oldest generations, which transitioned to adulthood before, or in the beginning of, the evolving welfare state. However, when turning to the younger generation, in her sample born in the 1970s – a generation born into the heyday of the welfare state – she instead sees an increase in narratives of closeness and trust towards one’s parents. This tendency is also confirmed in later and similar studies, of yet younger generations (Vasbø & Hegna, 2023).

Quantitative studies focusing transfers and help between generations in families add to the questioning of the conventional narrative of decline. These are particularly interesting as they also include generational links beyond the parent–child relation, and also explicitly focus on care practices. Research on intergenerational solidarity questions the assumption of strong welfare states as crowding out family help, and that high availability of services would ‘tend to reduce the need for family help, or even discourage it’, and suggests instead that welfare states can have a crowding in effect, implying that access to welfare services have tended to complement or even ‘stimulate the family effort by sharing the burdens’ (Daatland & Lowenstein, 2005, p. 176; Kohli, 1999). Statistics point towards this being the case also in Sweden. For example, engagement of grandparents in their adult children’s family lives has increased in Sweden in recent years (Bordone et al., 2023; Zanasi et al., 2023): more than 60% of grandmothers and 45% of grandfathers report providing care to grandchildren (Björnberg & Ekbrand, 2008; Halleröd, 2008; Hank & Buber, 2009, p. 61). Herlofson and Hagestad (2012, pp. 34, 36) find similarly high involvement of grandparents in the lives of grandchildren in Sweden, Norway and Denmark as in other parts of Europe, and they also find as strong, or even stronger, agreement among Nordic grandparents that it is one’s ‘duty to be there for grandchildren in cases of difficulty’, and to provide encouragement to adult children in their role as parents. In addition, the proportion of the elderly with care needs who receive help from adult children and other close relatives outside the household has grown from 40% in 1988 to 65% in 2010 (Ulmanen, 2015, p. 21).

This article adds to this debate by arguing that a multi-generational biographical perspective, centring specifically on care practices, and including care practices beyond the parent–child, provides new understandings of the effects of strong welfare state provision on engagements between generations in families. This is accomplished by questioning assumptions of the autonomous individual as the driving actor in history in popular theories of individualisation and detraditionalisation (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Giddens, 1992), and instead departs from the notion of a relational person. Through this, a more complex image of intergenerational care engagements, both historically and today, emerge.

Theory: Relational layers and care as sentient activities

The ‘person’ in Smart’s (2007) theorising of ‘personal life’ is fundamentally relational. Others, both before and after Smart, have suggested a point of departure in Mead’s (1956) conceptualisation of self, with the insight that ‘the origin and foundation of the self, like those of thinking, are social’ (Holland et al., 2001; Nilsen, 2021, p. 126). In addition, as the self constantly ‘authors itself’, it is ‘made knowable’ in the words of others (Qureshi & Metlo, 2021, p. 165). This gives the potential for the researcher to detect the ways in which people ‘author their lives’ by identifying relationality in ‘how people explicitly take other people into consideration, as someone to love and to care for, have responsibility towards or being accountable to’ (Nilsen, 2021, p. 126), but also as people to be annoyed by or worry over, and sometimes even mark distance to.

A tool for this is Mason’s (2004) identification of ‘relational layers’ in people’s biographies. Mason suggests that there are four ways in which relations to family and kin are narrated in people’s biographies. In narratives of relational inclusion and co-presence there is a taken-for-granted co-presence and inclusion of kin, to the extent that ‘the narratives tell a consensual “family story”’ (Mason, 2004, p. 168), while in narratives of relational participation, the common theme is ‘explicit reference to open discussion and negotiation’ and making decisions with key others, with ‘full consideration of all the circumstances as seen by each partner’ (Mason, 2004, p. 171). This latter form of narrating is often ‘characterised by “we-speak”’, in which mutual cooperation and participation between partners are ‘displayed as moral virtues’ (Mason, 2004, p. 169). While Mason notes that all layers of relational narratives entail both positive and negative elements, she identifies one where the negative is at the centre: narratives of relational constraint and conflict. In these, relationships are portrayed as destructive, and negotiations are fraught with conflict, making the very relationality of people’s practices a major source of resentment (Mason, 2004, p. 172). Finally, in narratives of relational individualism, a strong ‘self’ is put at the centre, and people emphasise individual control and agency (Mason, 2004, pp. 176–177).

When we take our point of departure in the notion of the relational self and insights about the different ways in which people see and understand themselves in relation to others, the narrative of the development of the opportunities to form ‘autonomous lives’ in modern society can be questioned. The trajectory of a move towards weakening intergenerational relations emerges as more complicated. As I will show in the following, the development of the Swedish welfare state does indeed create opportunities to lead more autonomous lives in relation to economic and practical arrangements around care in the everyday, primarily for women. However, I will also show how – what I call – sentient engagements between generations increase and bind people together during the decades under study. ‘Sentient’ refers to Mason’s (1996) theorising of care as a ‘sentient activity’. Drawing on feminist ethics of care theories, and its focus on the ‘moral thinking’ activities within care (Gilligan, 1982; Ruddick, 1995), and, in particular, Tronto’s (1993) recognition of caring as consisting of different types of phases and activities – moral, practical and sentient – Mason suggests an understanding of care particularly suited for exploring the significance of caring in the context of family and kin. When being in care situations, actors need to engage in sentient activities she argues. While emotions are often understood as states-of-being, and as less serious or compelling than ‘hard’ circumstances, ‘sentient’ points towards the active, often demanding, but rarely acknowledged and often underestimated, emotive parts of doing care (cf. DeVault, 1991). Mason exemplifies these with:

. . . attending to, noticing, hearing, being attuned to, seeing, constructing, interpreting, studying, exercising an interest in [the] needs, health, wellbeing, behaviours, likes and dislikes, moods, individuality, character, relationships . . . of specific others [or] thinking through, working out, organizing, planning, orchestrating relationships between oneself and others [and] relationships between others. (Mason, 1996, p. 27)

To recognise sentient engagements is to acknowledge not only that people take others into consideration, but also that this activity in itself is experienced as ambivalent (Luescher & Pillemer, 1998): sentient engagements are simultaneously appreciated and demanding, creating strong connections that affect – and sometimes impede – how one can (and wants to) live one’s life. This becomes an analytical tool for showing how social structures (here, with focus on the developing welfare state) affect the ways in which people can lead lives in relation to others (here, with focus on generational relations within families), in complex ways where economic, practical and sentient engagements are intertwined.

The study: Care biographies

The article draws on a qualitative study on intergenerational care, with interviews with 63 individuals, comprising grandparents, adult children and grandchildren. The grandparents (18 women, 10 men) were born between 1940 and 1955 and were selected because they grew up and/or formed families during the aspiring years of the Swedish welfare state and lived through its expansion, enabling us to capture biographies of care in this context. This means that the sample is ethnically less diverse compared to the situation in Sweden in later decades: five of the grandparents were born outside Sweden, but their children spent their childhoods in Sweden. The grandparents have diverse class backgrounds: a majority were born in working-class/rural families, and although most have experiences of social mobility through the life course, a third of them have stayed working class throughout life. We also interviewed 15 adult children (10 women, 5 men) born 1966–1985, and 20 grandchildren (12 girls, 8 boys) born 2001–2015. Some of these are related to the initially interviewed grandparents, but for ethical reasons, we also recruited the younger cohorts independently. Participants were recruited through pensioner organisations, posters, online and social media advertisements, and snowballing.

The interviews were semi-structured with a biographical focus, where participants were asked to talk about care and care relations during their lives, and lasted between 20 minutes and two hours. Twenty-five of the adult participants agreed to be interviewed twice, and we used different techniques to support the narrations, such as the life-line technique, concentric circles of closeness and diaries (Mason & Tipper, 2008; Sheridan et al., 2011). In the interviews with children, we used visual methods in the form of a draw-your-day method and concentric circles of closeness (Eldén, 2013).

All interviews were carried out by the project team consisting of the author, Terese Anving and Linn Alenius Wallin, between spring 2020 and autumn 2022. The study partly took place during the Covid-19 pandemic; some interviews were carried out face-to-face, pre-corona or outdoors, others were conducted using digital devices. Interviews were spread out in time to encompass the preferences, needs and safety of participants. The effects of the pandemic on intergenerational relations are discussed in Eldén et al. (2022). All interviews were recorded and transcribed in full. We have collectively engaged in analysing the data through extensive and focused reading and coding of the transcribed interviews and the visual data, and together identified dominant themes. For the analysis put forth in this article, I am indebted to these discussions but solely responsible.

Biographical interviews have proven particularly suited for capturing the complex interconnections of social change and kinship networks (Brannen, 2013, p. 49; Smart, 2011, p. 20). Memories are always inevitably interpreted through the lens of the present, requiring acknowledgement of the fact that they are always influenced by contemporary ideals. In addition, narratives of experiences of care are personal, and how ever comprehensive a qualitative study, generalisations are delicate. At the same time, individual memory is inherently social, relying on communication and context for meaning (Smart, 2011, p. 18), and while the patterns identified here may not fit everyone equally well, they can still ‘crystallise into a shared feeling of “the way things are”, or a sense of life, in a given period of time’ (Bjerrum Nielsen, 2017, p. 12), particularly when put into conversation with previous research. Through this lens, this analysis depicts the ‘lived experience’ of intergenerational care, drawing from the memories of three different generations, and by comparing memories across different cohorts, overarching patterns can emerge.

Lived experiences of intergenerational care

Intergenerational care relations in the post-war era

This section focuses on narratives told by the oldest cohort in the study, of their experiences of care relations from the position of being children and grandchildren in the post-war era. The backdrop to their narratives is a Sweden undergoing dramatic change: the years following World War II are when the welfare state began to be realised in practice. Many of the changes that occurred affected intergenerational relations. Eldercare reforms introduced homes for the elderly, and in 1956, changes to the social law removed adult children’s responsibility to financially support and care for their parents (Ulmanen, 2015, p. 19). In relation to care for children, maternity allowances had already been instituted in the 1930s, while general child support was in place by 1947. Both of these aimed to support the capability of nuclear families to care for children. Children were increasingly seen as future citizens for society to care for and cultivate (Sandin, 2011). On a broader level, economic growth, coupled with the ideals of the social democratic welfare state, enabled unprecedented levels of social mobility for large groups of people (cf. Bjerrum Nielsen, 2017, p. 14).

The improving economic and social situation of families comes through in the narratives of being a child in this era, not least in the many narratives of rapidly improving housing situations. Between their early childhood and their teenage years, the informants tell about moving from cramped housing without running water to centrally heated houses and indoor lavatories. This affected relations between generations in the sense of an emerging possibility of economic and practical independence between the oldest cohort’s parents and their parents (the cohort’s grandparents). However, this was only a possibility if one was in a nuclear family. If, for example, one became pregnant out of wedlock, or if the father-to-be was too young to financially support the family, one was still very much dependent on parents’ ability to help out, both financially and with the children’s care. If one managed to form a nuclear family, care responsibilities fell categorically on the mother. The breadwinner–housewife family was the ideal of a ‘respectable’ family (Frykman & Löfgren, 2022), but that was hard to realise for the growing number of nuclear families within the working classes. Almost all respondents in this oldest cohort answered ‘housewife’ to the question of their mother’s occupation, but the answer was later qualified by narratives of the mother actually being in paid work, often in informal cleaning and often at irregular hours. Childcare was the mother’s responsibility regardless of whether she was also working.

Frida (born 1948), for example, grew up in a traditional nuclear family which embarked on a typical social mobility track of becoming a ‘respectable’ working-class family during her childhood years. She sees her mother, a ‘housewife’, as her primary carer during her childhood – a mother who also had several cleaning jobs in the evenings and, on occasion, a part-time job at a hospital. Both Frida’s maternal and paternal grandmothers lived nearby, and while the maternal grandmother looked after Frida and her siblings occasionally when the mother worked, she was ‘rather old and not that active’ in providing care, as Frida remembers it. Nor was the paternal grandmother.

And my paternal grandmother was definitely not engaged in our care. I didn’t say ‘you’ to my grandmother. And neither did my mother. She said ‘aunt’. That’s what they did then. And well, my grandmother was not kind. So that everyone bowed and so on. Everyone had great respect for her.

While some respondents in this oldest cohort do recall grandmothers who were emotionally close and supportive (Eldén et al., 2024), the narrative of distance and authority when describing grandparents is much more prevalent in this generation, compared to the two younger ones.

Care for elderly grandparents is rarely talked about in the interviews, and when it occurs, it is often recalled as a cause of conflict and tension, especially for the respondents’ mothers. Walborg (born 1945), for example, recalls that her paternal grandmother had to move in with the family when widowed, as her apartment was tied to her deceased husband’s employment. To Walborg’s mother’s disappointment, the grandmother had no intention of helping out in taking care of her grandchildren.

Mum had thought grandma would help out in taking care of us . . . when she moved in with us but grandma said that ‘I am done babysitting in my life’. She was very clear about what she thought and wanted.

The grandmother ended up staying with Walborg’s parents almost all her life: ‘On her ninetieth birthday, mom finally got her out of the house, she just couldn’t bear to have here there any longer, and then she moved to an elderly home’, Walborg recalls.

The dominant relational narrative at this time is that of relational inclusion and co-presence. The organisation of family life and care in and through the nuclear family assigns people unquestioned roles, with little room for negotiation. While one can detect traces of constraint and conflict, these are rarely voiced openly. Interestingly, Walborg’s narrative conveys a grandmother whose positioning could best be characterised as relational individualism: she purports a strong self in refusing to engage in more care work in relation to her grandchildren. This is portrayed as wrong, but is nonetheless accepted by the rest of the family.

We can thus conclude that the ties between the generations are portrayed as declining. Financial independence from parents is becoming a possibility at this point in time, if and when one enters into the nuclear family unit. And this, in turn, makes women continuously economically dependent on their husbands, and firmly tied to their role as wives and mothers, with responsibility for providing practical care to both children and the elderly. There are few descriptions of emotional closeness between generations at this point in time, and, in particular, it is not expected that there should be close relations between grandparents and grandchildren.

Becoming a parent, being an adult child and a grandchild in the 1960s–1980s

This section departs from the narratives of the oldest cohort, on starting their own families, as well as the middle cohort’s accounts of being grandchildren, in the 1960s–1980s.

The oldest cohort’s narratives about the relationships to their own parents at this time are often described in a way that can be characterised as relational constraint and conflict (Mason, 2004). Growing physical and social distance – as a consequence of urbanisation and educational opportunities (Statistics Sweden, 2015) – is described as resulting in feelings of ‘living in different worlds’ from your parents. At this time, society is also beginning to make possible new forms for being a family through increased possibilities of divorce. The organisation of care for children goes through significant changes at this time, most notably in the shift from maternity allowance to gender-neutral parental leave (in 1974) which made it possible for men to take leave when they became fathers, and we also see the start of the expansion of the public daycare sector.

Tora’s (born 1951) narrative can be seen as representing someone who very much embraced the new possibilities that emerged particularly for women at this time in history. Tora was eager to leave the family home, and also the city where she grew up, and the opportunity arose when she – as one of the first in her wider family circle – entered higher education. Tora moved to a university town, enrolled in university studies, and became engaged in radical political circles. This enhanced the distance to her parents, she says.

I have never had a loving emotional relationship to my parents. I thought they were very strict, they came from a working-class background . . . and they always felt everyone’s eyes on them, that you have to be respectable.

Her mother, especially, was deeply concerned with keeping up appearances, Tora remembers. The mother started out as a working woman, but as Tora’s father rose through the ranks, she became a housewife. Her mother came to represent what Tora, in her new circles at the university, despised: a shallow, ‘worried’ and subordinate femininity, trapped in the nuclear family, engaged in, as Bjerrum Nielsen (2017, p. 142) describes this generation of women, ‘the endless occupation with keeping up a neat and proper façade’.

When Tora had her two children in the beginning of the 1980s, she and her partner (they never married) split the parental leave between them. During the children’s early years, Tora moved back to her city of birth and lived close to her parents, separated from her partner, re-partnered with another man, and was, for some years, a stepmother to his children. Tora worked full-time most of these years, and the children’s care situation was a mixture of sharing responsibilities with her partner, a dagmamma – a popular informal arrangement at this time, where a stay-at-home mother cared for neighbourhood children at her home, in exchange for money – public daycare and exchanging babysitting with friends and neighbours. Her own parents, however, were not interested in helping out or taking part in her children’s everyday life. She remembers one time when she called to ask her mother – then retired – to take care of the youngest child for a few days.

. . . and it sounded like she thought it would be such a hassle, she ‘had an appointment at the hairdresser’, they ‘were in their summer house’, it was just blah, blah, blah. So I hung up and cried. I thought it was so sad.

While Tora, thanks to public daycare and informal arrangements with friends and neighbours, could usually solve the care situation she still found it sad that her parents were not interested in getting to know her children better. This, she says, is something she reflected on when she became a grandmother herself: ‘I don’t want to be like that, I want to get to know [my grandchildren], I want to spend time together with them.’

For Tora, who had small children at a time when the organisation of care through public daycare was starting to become more widespread, and whose education put her in a good financial situation, economic and practical autonomy from her parents was possible. However, this did not preclude her from wanting her parents to take part in their grandchildren’s lives; taking action to try to make this happen, and feeling sad when the parents were uninterested.

Tora’s narrative can be seen as representing the more radical turn in the lives of women at this time. However, most narratives in the study – both of men and women – tell of more tentative movements away from previous ways of organising care in everyday life, in which marriage and the nuclear family still take front stage. Hedvig (born 1946), for example, like Tora, began on a career track by getting into university. Later, when the children were born, she instead chose to adjust her life to the work of her husband, moving house to wherever his work took them, and eventually became a stay-at-home mother, and at times a dagmamma. While there were possibilities of enrolling the children in public daycare, both Hedvig and her husband remember feeling reluctant to do so: ‘I felt sorry for children who had to get up so early in the morning and rush away, I wanted to be at home so they could have some peace and quiet’, Hedvig says.

Similarly to Tora, Hedvig describes the relationship to her own parents as distant, but Hedvig’s mother-in-law, the children’s paternal grandmother, played a more active role in the children’s upbringing. She lived far away and rarely engaged in everyday care, but frequently came to visit – sometimes for weeks at the time – and the children often went to stay at her place for long periods during school holidays.

While many like Hedvig did not embrace the possibilities of public daycare (which also was not an option in all geographical areas of Sweden at this time) that would have made it possible for her to utilise her education and enter into a less traditional maternal care role, it is noticeable for the women and men in this generation that they have to relate to this possibility. The narratives of organising care for children during this period are full of negotiations and decision-making that must be legitimised. Concerns about the quality of daycare facilities are raised, as are worries about children spending too many hours away from home. In the end, it is the responsibility of the mother to adjust to the chosen solution, whether by becoming a stay-at-home mother, working part-time, hiring a nanny (which is becoming less and less common) or becoming – or hiring – a dagmamma, or in other ways informally or semi-formally engaging others in the patchwork of care.

What is noticeable in the narratives of becoming a parent at this time in history is the limited involvement of grandparents in the everyday life of families, similar to the previous generation. With few exceptions, the organisation of everyday care for children does not involve grandparents. Sometimes, physical distance precludes this, but even in cases where grandparents lived close by, it is rare that they engaged in everyday care. This does not, however, mean that close relations between grandchildren and grandparents are not formed. Instead, like Hedvig’s narrative shows, the practice of having grandparents taking care of grandchildren during the holidays grew, and seems to open up new possibilities for grandparents and grandchildren to form more independent relationships, regardless of parents.

Both Tora’s and Hedvig’s children participated in this study, and their narratives both correspond to those of their mothers, and also sometimes diverge. Tora’s son Gabriel (born 1980) is very aware of his mother’s disappointment with her own parents’ lack of engagement, but he himself has a very good relationship with them, especially his maternal grandfather, whom he considers to be very close to himself and his own children. Hedvig’s daughter Camilla (born 1972) tells vividly about her admiration for her paternal grandmother, who she considers a role model for how to be as a caring person. Camilla confirms the distant relation to her maternal grandmother that Hedvig describes, and retells how she, as a child, really wanted to have a closer relationship, but failed as the grandmother did not respond to her attempts. As we have argued elsewhere (Eldén et al., 2024), it is much more common in the middle cohort to describe close relationships – or a wish for close relations – to grandparents while, at the same time, the oldest cohort describe more distant relations to the same individuals (i.e. to their parents). There thus seems to be more interest in, and an expectation of, close relations between grandparents and grandchildren from all parties at this time, compared to the oldest generations. Compared to narratives from previous and more recent times, however, there is little talk about care for the elderly. Indeed, this is the time in history when the eldercare sector is at its prime in Sweden (Trydegård, 2000).

We can see several relational layers in the narratives of this generation. There is a shift from narratives of inclusion and co-presence, to more narratives of relational participation. The conscious ‘taking-into-account’ of others and negotiating and organising relationships to accomplish good care situations (often in response to different contrasting norms in society, especially for women) are more common at this time, compared to previous times, with its more taken-for-granted roles and relations. One could argue that Tora’s narrative, at times, represents a more relational-individualist approach, for example, in her strong emphasis on leaving her family of origin to pursue her own life goals. At the same time, narratives like Tora’s attest to continuously taking others into account, not least since her choices make possible the forming of care relations to others – outside of family and kin relations – but also in relation to her strong wish for her parents to take part in the care of her children, and her disappointment when this does not happen. However, the most predominant narratives around intergenerational relations at this time from the oldest cohort’s perspective are those expressing constraint and conflict towards their parents, centred on experiences of leading fundamentally different lives, and disappointment when good grandparent–grandchild relations were not realised.

At this point in time, there was little need for economic and practical help from the older generation when one formed a family. Instead, we see an increase in expectations of emotional engagement, especially between grandparents and grandchildren. This is expressed particularly by the middle cohort – the then-grandchildren – but also the oldest cohort in our study is interested in enabling this relationship to develop, even though they themselves often feel emotionally distant from their parents; and sometimes they engage in sentient activities of organising these relationships ‘between others’ (Mason, 1996), by, for example, initiating stays during holidays. Importantly, these engagements are not only experienced as positive, but are sometimes fraught with conflict and pain: to ask for closeness, for oneself (as in the case of Camilla) or for others (as Tora), is to expose oneself and others as vulnerable, and to risk being turned down.

Becoming a grandparent, an adult child and a grandchild in the 2000s

This section focuses on narratives of being a grandparent today, and relationships to one’s own now-adult children, and one’s grandchildren, as well as the perspectives of adult children and grandchildren themselves.

For the first time, in this period, quantitative data are available measuring the engagement of grandparents in their adult children’s everyday family life in the Nordic countries, as I noted in the introduction. Despite this being a time with extensive access to welfare state services, when most young children are enrolled in public daycare, the engagement of grandparents in the families of their adult children is comparatively encompassing. In addition, and as noted above, the engagement of adult children in the care situation of their elderly parents is also growing.

In the narratives of engaging in intergenerational care as a grandparent, the ideals of close relations between grandparents and grandchildren that we saw emerging in the narratives of the 1960s–1980s are now fully developed. All three generations confirm this:

Many people say that grandchildren are livets efterrätt [literally ‘life’s dessert’, meaning something special that happens towards the end of life], and I think it’s even better than that. The grandchildren, they’re a three-course luxury meal somehow, that is, they add very, very much. (Åke, born 1951)

The support has always been there. And they [the grandparents] call my daughter directly and ask how she is doing. So that doesn’t have to go through us, they call and check in with her. . . . You can feel the support. And they’ve also been picking up the children from daycare regularly . . . they really have been there for us. (Emil, born 1974)

I think it’s very fun, it’s very nice to get away from your parents sometimes, when you are tired of them. Then I have someone who still knows me, and maybe knows me a little better, almost. And you don’t get tired of grandparents. (Isabelle, born 2008)

Compared with previous generational narratives, three aspects stand out as enabling this ideal of the close grandparent–grandchild relationship.

Firstly, grandparents more often describe themselves as engaged in and close to the adult child generation, something which is also confirmed in interviews with the latter. The conflictual sense of living different lives from one’s elderly parents are – compared to previous times – very rare in these narratives; on the contrary, similarities and support are stressed by both the oldest and the middle cohort (cf. Vasbø & Hegna, 2023). Secondly, the engagement is, in nature, increasingly practical and more focused on helping out in the everyday, compared to narratives from earlier times. Emil, in the quote above, mentions how his parents pick up his children from daycare, and this narrative recurs in almost all interviews. Grandparents are more often an active part of solving the work–family dilemma of their adult children’s families, reflecting both that mothers are more involved in paid labour today, and that there is a need for informal care arrangements – like grandparents – even though children are enrolled in daycare to a much higher degree than in previous times. Several of the oldest participants in our study have even made arrangements to move closer to their adult children’s families, or vice versa, to enable more everyday intergenerational involvement. Thirdly, there is a particular child-centredness in the practice of being a grandparent compared to previous generational interactions. Research on the intensification of parenting (Faircloth, 2014; Hays, 1996), also in Sweden (Mollborn & Billingsley, 2024), identifies child-centredness as particular to today’s family practices, and as we have argued elsewhere, grandparenting is also intensified (Anving et al., 2024; cf. Harman et al., 2022). Intensive grandparenting comes through in two ways: in centring practical engagement on grandchildren, but also through the creation and reproduction of a particular discourse of good grandparenting, that grandparents’ engagement with grandchildren should ‘add something extra’.

However, the extensive engagement and child-centredness are described in ambivalent ways in the grandparents’ narratives. The child-centredness sometimes makes one feel like just ‘a play lady’, as one grandmother says. And, saying no to one’s adult children is difficult. Susanna (born 1947) describes a balancing act very similar to that captured in May’s et al. (2012) analysis, of ‘being there yet not interfering’: on the one hand, she genuinely wants to be involved in the lives of her grandchildren but, on the other, she feels that the engagement is orchestrated by the adult children, and that this is problematic:

[The adult child and his wife] have been very keen from the beginning that we should help out and that we should be involved, we have been babysitting and the grandchildren have been staying with us and all sorts of things. But as soon as you speak up, then, well, then it doesn’t work.

‘Speaking up’ refers in Susanna’s narrative both to interfering in matters relating to the children, for example, in expressing opinions on their upbringing, but also to setting boundaries around when and how one wants to be engaged as a grandparent. However, when in the interviews grandparents express dissatisfaction, this is always coupled with a reiteration of their affection for their grandchildren. The ideal of the good grandparent entails a strong norm of being willing to be self-sacrificing – the norm is ‘to let go of everything else for one’s grandchildren’, and live one’s life through them, as the grandmother Alva (born 1952) puts it (Anving et al., 2024).

While few in our study have yet experienced substantial care needs for the grandparent generation, the awareness that this might happen is there, and again, is imbued with ambivalence. Despite their intense engagement with the younger generations, the oldest cohort does not express any expectation of being taken care of by their adult children when they themselves need care (cf. Ulmanen, 2015). However, there is an awareness and worry that the widely reported cutbacks in the eldercare sector in Sweden will impact on intergenerational relations. ‘You’re becoming more dependent on your relatives’, Alva says, and ‘I don’t want to burden them’. Ivan (born 1980) reflects on the relation between welfare services and family care.

I believe in this institutionalized Sweden, it might sound a bit cold and hard, but there is something effective in it. It allows . . . both parents to work. There are so many support structures. I like that . . . But I still think that you need to take care of your parents when they get older. Because otherwise, they’ll get food at an elderly care home, but more is needed. You can give human closeness, and you can give. . . you can share memories, this gives some kind of warmth to them that they don’t get otherwise, in just the institutionalized care.

In Ivan’s view, the welfare services are necessary for enabling the care family members should provide – the closeness, memory-sharing and warmth, as he puts it – and, like Alva, he expresses a worry that this seems to be changing now.

The narratives about care between generations at this point in time are primarily characterised by sentiments of relational participation (Mason, 2004), while narratives expressing relational individualism are very rare. The imperative of taking others into account, particularly kin, runs through all generational narratives, sometimes in a taken-for-granted way, but more often in the careful planning of how one participates in others’ lives. This bears the potential of constraint and conflict, but not arising from a sense of distance as in earlier generations, but the opposite. It is the intense engagement in the practicalities of the everyday that evokes feeling of ambivalence (Luescher & Pillemer, 1998) – of balancing the feeling of being taken for granted with that of wanting to be needed – that is at the centre of, particularly, the grandparents’ narratives.

The narratives of all three cohorts attest to increasing engagements between generations at this point in time, primarily related to practical, but also to sentient engagements: the strong feeling of needing to be there for one another, and to take responsibility for one another in care situations.

Conclusion: Sentient engagements and intergenerational ties

The narrative of strong welfare states leading to weakening intergenerational ties and reduced intergenerational engagement has very little bearing in the empirical data analysed in this study. When departing from care biographies, and from an understanding of the self as relational (Smart, 2007), we see how generational relations change with the new possibilities and challenges posed by the development of the welfare state, but continue, in a profound way, to matter in people’s lives.

The relational layers (Mason, 2004) in the first period under study – the post-war era – are characterised by relational inclusion and co-presence, but are firmly centred on the nuclear family: it is only if and when this entity can be realised that ties to older generations can be reduced, and economic and practical autonomy can be accomplished. The nuclear family, in turn, is built on a clear gender contract: women’s position as housewives makes them economically dependent on their husbands and is clearly tied to a caring role that intertwines their lives with those of others (their own children, elderly parents). Very few narratives express expectations of more emotional engagement between generations, certainly not between grandparents and grandchildren, and while narratives of constraint and conflict can be detected in the memories they recount, it is rare that these are expressed openly.

In the second time period – the 1960s–1980s – narratives of intergenerational care engagement are instead characterised by a combination of increased distance and conflict, particularly between the oldest cohort in the study and their elderly parents, and an increased expectation of closeness between grandchildren and grandparents. Practical care arrangements are still primarily the responsibility of mothers, but possibilities have emerged for women to economically free themself from the nuclear family, and to organise care outside the family. This is a time with little necessity for intergenerational engagements for economic or practical reasons, while an awareness of other, more emotionally centred, intergenerational care needs is also starting to be expressed more clearly.

The narratives of the final period, from the 2000s until today, is primarily characterised by relational participation: conscious decision-making and planning for the realisation of a comparably substantial presence in each other’s lives across generations. The middle cohort express clear needs of practical engagements from the oldest cohort. This practical help is, in many cases, portrayed as necessary for dual-earner families to solve the work–family dilemma, despite extensive access to daycare, and grandparents are aware of their key role in this. This also increases the risks for inequalities between families: as we have argued elsewhere, not all grandparents have the same capability to help out in the lives of their adult children’s families (Anving et al., 2024).

In addition, there is an increased expression in all three cohorts’ narratives today, of the need to ‘be there’ for one another (for more of the grandchild narratives, see Eldén et al., 2024): of taking in and taking responsibility for one another in care situations. These sentient engagements are entangled with practical, everyday engagement – when you spend more time together, the need to ‘attend to’ (Mason, 1996) each other becomes more obvious. But it also represents something more: a profound sense of needing one another, beyond helping with practical chores and giving financial support. This is experienced as positive, but also, the new ideals of grandparenting are experienced in ambivalent ways and the worry of becoming ‘a burden’ to one another lurks in the background, particularly in relation to the needs of the elderly. Re-familialisation processes stemming from neoliberal policies (Borchorst & Siim, 2008) have particularly affected the eldercare sector (Ulmanen, 2015), and they may result in increasing needs of informal family care, when the ‘sharing of the burden’ (Daatland & Lowenstein, 2005, p. 176) with a strong welfare state can no longer be taken for granted.

It is notable that the narratives in this study do not move in the direction of increased relational individualism: at all three points in time, there are examples of individuals who have or would like to put themselves first at particular points in time (Walborg’s unhelpful grandmother; the young adult Tora, who leaves the family home to educate herself; the grandmother Susanna who wishes to sometimes say no to babysitting, but doesn’t dare) – but this is not a more common narrative in later times, nor does it permeate the life stories of the informants. On the contrary, these expressions always occur and are negotiated in life stories full of narratives of comprehensive care engagement with others.

It is clear that an extensive welfare state changes people’s possibilities to lead autonomous lives in relation to economic and practical involvement between generations, particularly so for women; making use of welfare services and provisions instead of depending on family is possible, which would be the argument of the crowding out thesis. However, quantitative research shows that this is not the case: strong welfare states seem to in some instances crowd in intergenerational engagements, particularly when it comes to grandparent care for grandchildren. The analysis presented in this article – a relational analysis of multi-generational biographies focusing specifically on care practices – shows the contours of these engagements, and particularly, their sentient character. It shows how sentient engagements become more important in intergenerational relations as the welfare state develops. While this is a small study, and while it is hard to evidence with retrospective narratives only, there is no question that the importance of emotional activities and engagement is heavily stressed today, and narrated as a contrast to previous times. Previous research on generational change and transitions in the Nordic welfare states affirms this: the ‘emotional links’ identified by Bjerrum Nielsen (2017) and ‘emotional ties’ discussed in Vasbø and Hegna’s (2023) study point towards both increasing importance of emotions in general in family relations (Aarseth, 2018), and to the increase in the expressions of emotional closeness of generational engagements.

By using the term ‘sentient’ instead of emotional, this study wishes to move away from notions of the emotional as a ‘states-of being’ and point towards its character as activities. This is an endeavour to repudiate the notion that emotional aspects are less ‘heavy’ in people’s lives: that emotions are ‘just feelings’ that can easily change, are less binding, constraining – or enabling – than economic and practical dimensions. When Giddens (1992, p. 61) portrays the ‘pure relationship’ ideal as characteristic of intimate relations in late modernity, he rightfully identifies the importance of emotions – but wrongfully connects it to the autonomous individual and their search for self-satisfaction. This study shows how emotional activities are relational, and fundamental in people’s ways of organising their intergenerational care engagements, and how this creates sentient engagements. Sentient engagements are not to be reduced to feelings of love or affection, but are often experienced as ambivalent. Sentient engagements in intergenerational care relations come out as a worry, a demand and a vulnerability, and put one at risk of disappointment or even exploitation. Regardless, this study shows how they seem to be growing in importance parallel to the growth of a strong welfare stare, attesting to the ‘enduring importance of kith and kin in our lives’ (Twamley et al., 2021, p. 4), and to new ways in which intergenerational care relations are done.