Integrating the Second Generation: Gender and Family Attitudes in Early Adulthood in Sweden

This paper focuses on attitudes towards three family challenges of early adulthood among native-born Swedes of differing origins. We examine attitudes towards forming new partnerships through cohabitation versus marriage, partnering within or outside one’s national group, and preferring a more traditional versus a more egalitarian balance of work and family when children are young. Attitudes about these dimensions reveal the extent to which the adult children of Polish and Turkish origins living in Sweden have accepted Swedish family forms or expect to retain some forms of family distinctiveness. We base our analysis on a 1999 survey of young adults in Sweden (Family and Working Life in the 21st Century). The survey consisted of 2,326 respondents who were ages 22 and 26, of whom 500 had at least one parent who was born either in Turkey or Poland. We focus on the factors increasing acceptance of Swedish family forms. We consider the effects of two measures of exposure to Swedish values in the community (education, neighborhood ethnic segregation), a measure indicating the extent of exposure to Swedish values in the childhood family (parental intermarriage), and a factor suggesting the weakening of familial support for the culture of origin (disrupted childhood family structure). We find that there are systematic differences in family attitudes among the second generation that reflect their ethnic origins, with sharp differences between young adults of Turkish and Swedish origins. Swedes of Polish origin much more closely resemble those of Swedish origins. However, the family attitudes of both groups of young women and men of non-Swedish origins appear to be approaching Swedish-origin young adults, particularly relative to the family patterns in their parents’ home communities. The extent to which this is true, however, depends differentially on the community and family contexts in which they grew up.