A mom in Sweden took 21 months off when her kids were born, and her partner took 15. Sharing parental leave changed their expectations of each other.

• Nicola Lindgren, a platform manager living in Sweden, has taken 21 months of paid parental leave.
• In Sweden, new parents are given 480 total days of leave per child.
• There's no stigma about parents taking time off to spend with their new children, Lindgren said.

Nicola Lindgren moved from New Zealand to Sweden for a job in her mid-20s.

She didn't plan on staying for longer than a year — until she met her future husband. They got married in 2015.

Lindgren knew Sweden had a good reputation for childcare and work-life balance, and the couple decided to stay in the country to be near his family. They had their first child together in October 2019.

Parents get 480 days of leave in Sweden

In Sweden, parents are entitled to 480 days of leave per child. By default, these are split evenly between two parents; they can transfer up to 150 days to each other, and take up to 30 of the same days off. A single parent gets the full 480 days.

Lindgren started parental leave two weeks before their daughter was born, after which her husband took 10 days of paid leave, which is standard practice in Sweden.

"It was such a shock to the system. You hear other people say how hard it is to be a parent and how tired you'll be," Lindgren told BI. "But the reality of waking up every hour or two to breastfeed made me so grateful to have my husband at home."

In total, Lindgren took 10 months of parental leave for her first child and said she was paid 80% of her salary during most of this period.

Lindgren and her husband were both off work with their baby for three months. Her husband took a combination of parental leave and annual leave to make it happen.

"I loved it," she said. "When I needed a nap or a rest, my husband could cuddle our child."

Taking time off together helped them relate to each other

Lindgren said it "felt like a massive change in my identity having my whole life revolve around a child."

"Having my husband take a good chunk of parental leave made me feel like we got to walk a mile in each other's shoes," she said.

When she went back to work, her husband could experience what she had at home all day with the baby. He took 10 months off, three of which overlapped with Lindgren. Swapping roles helped them manage their expectations of each other, she said.

"When I started working again, I started to relate more to him and realized how he felt," she said. "I didn't fully get that until it was my turn to go back to work."

When their second child was born in December 2021, Lindgren took another eight months of parental leave. Her husband overlapped by one month and then a further five months, during which she was back at work.

Workplaces in Sweden are flexible around childcare

Between children, Lindgren returned to work full-time as a platform manager for a large retailer.

Lindgren said there was no stigma around her parental leave among her colleagues.

"Senior managers will say they need to finish work early because preschool finishes or that they're going to start work a bit later because of something to do with their kids," she said.

"I'm very lucky," she said.