Nanny Families

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence

Paying privately for childcare is a growing phenomenon worldwide, a trend mirrored in Sweden despite the prevalence there of publicly funded daycare. This book combines theories of family practices, care and childhood studies with the personal perspectives of nannies, au pairs, parents and children to provide new understandings of what constitutes care in nanny families.

The authors investigate the ways in which all the participants experience the caring situation, and expose the possibilities and problems of nanny and au pair care. Their study illuminates the ways in which paid domestic care workers 'do' family and care; in doing so, it contributes to wider political and scientific discussions of inequalities at the global and local level, reproduced in and between families, in the context of rapidly changing welfare states.

Sara Eldén is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lund University

She researches sociology of family and personal life, feminist theory, and childhood sociology. She is dedicated to developing new methods for researching everyday practices and life narratvies, especially in research with children. She has been a visiting scholar at the Morgan Centre at University of Manchester, and at the Centre for Childhood Studies at University of Leeds.

Terese Anving is a senior lecturer at the Department of Gender Studies at Lund University. She researches sociology of gender and family relationships, with a special focus on inequalities of everyday life.