New Research Project Puts Sweden´s Parental Leave Under the Microscope: Impacts on Mental Health Across Life

The initiative, titled Parental Leave and Mental Health across the Life Course (PaLMH) will investigate whether the benefits of parental leave extend far beyond the early years of parenting – and whether they ripple into the lives of children as they grow into adulthood.

“The project takes advantage of Sweden’s unique position not only as a forerunner in parental leave policy, but also due to its long history of maintaining rich social and health-related data on the total population. For these reasons, not many countries have the opportunity to investigate the impacts of parental leave policies for both parents and children up to fifty years later,” says Helena Honkaniemi-Hoppe, project manager and principal investigator.

Sweden’s parental leave system was first introduced in 1974, and was lengthened in subsequent years, resulting in an increasing proportion of participating fathers. By comparing families whose children were born just before and just after key policy changes in the 1970s and 1980s, the team aims to isolate the long-term mental health effects of these reforms.

At the time of the system being instigated, Sweden was the first country to introduce gender-neutral paid parental leave. It was designed to support both mothers and fathers and promote a more equal balance between work and family life. While short-term benefits of parental leave have been documented – such as reduced stress and improved wellbeing among parents – much less is known about whether these effects persist across decades or influence the next generation in the long term.

Tracking mental health across decades

Drawing on Sweden’s extensive population registers, linking data on births, family relationships, employment, social factors and mental health outcomes, the researchers will follow individuals for up to five decades, from childhood into adulthood for the affected children, and from adulthood to old age for their parents. Families will be distinguished by policy exposure (children’s birth before or after the 1974 introduction, and the expansions of parental leave benefits in the 1970s and the 1980s) and parental leave eligibility (maternal employment).

Using quasi-experimental methods, which are commonly applied in economics and other social sciences to better assess causality, the research team will examine differences in psychiatric outcomes, including use of psychotropic medications, outpatient and inpatient psychiatric care, and suicide risk.

“By using quasi-experimental methods we want to harness this unique opportunity to investigate real-world conditions with potentially long-term effects on mental health. These approaches help us to attribute any observed mental health inequalities to the parental leave policies themselves, rather than to other changes happening over the course of decades,” Honkaniemi-Hoppe says.

Beyond parents: a family-wide perspective

What sets this project apart is its comprehensive scope. Rather than focusing solely on parents who took leave, the research will explore “linked lives”—how policy impacts spread within families, particularly from parents to children.

This approach reflects a growing recognition in public health that wellbeing is shaped not just by individual choices, but by family dynamics and broader social systems.

Policy relevance in a changing world

Mental health inequalities in working life are a growing concern globally, with rising economic and social costs. By revisiting parental reforms introduced half a century ago, the project aims to provide timely insights for today’s policymakers in order to develop leave schemes and incentives today, helping to support gender equity and in turn tackle attributable health inequalities.

This project can help us better understand how sustainable welfare policies really are, and how they may unintentionally affect health – not just for individuals, but for families and even future generations. It also opens the door to new research on how social policies shape health over the long term. Its findings could inform how modern parental leave schemes are designed. Especially in terms of promoting gender equality, encouraging uptake among fathers, and reducing long-term health disparities.

Håkan Soold