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Background: Intermittent closures of rural maternity units in northern Sweden disrupt access to essential sexual and reproductive health services, making intrapartum care unpredictable for local women. While long travel distances have been linked to adverse outcomes, less is known about how women view the closures and prepare for birth when local services are unavailable. Hence, the aim of this study is to analyse how women make sense of and negotiate the meaning of their pregnancy and childbirth in relation to intermittent maternity unit closures in rural contexts.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 women who were pregnant or had given birth between May 2024 and August 2025 and lived in the catchment area of a rural maternity unit with repeated closures. Interviews were conducted in Swedish in September–November 2025, transcribed verbatim and analysed using discourse psychology to identify interpretative repertoires and subject positions.

Results:The closures created a discursive gap in which established expectations about where and how birth should take place no longer functioned as stable points of reference. Three interpretative repertoires were identified: equity and legitimacy, where women framed rural living as a chosen life yet treated secure maternity care as non-negotiable; moral responsibility, where risk management shifted from system-level preparedness to women’s own planning, including preparing for both hospital and roadside birth; and bodily vulnerability and dignity, where distance, admission thresholds and travel reshaped bodily labour, dignity and help-seeking, sometimes leading women to delay or avoid contacting healthcare services despite their concerns.

Conclusion: Intermittent closures disrupt access to maternity care and shift the responsibility for managing uncertainty and risk from the healthcare system to women themselves. Access to sexual and reproductive health services is more than a matter of geographical availability; it is shaped by how responsibility and legitimacy are negotiated in practice. Maternity services function as a clinical service and as a condition for whether family life feels possible and sustainable in rural communities.

The aim of this article is to analyse how Swedish mothers, regularly outsourcing cleaning, make use of different discursive resources and negotiate conflicting norms about domestic work when they discuss the role of cleaning in the socialisation of their children. Domestic work is often seen as boring yet character-building, socialising independence, self-esteem, responsibility and work ethic. However, time pressures have led more Swedish families to outsource domestic work, supported by tax deductions for services such as cleaning. Yet, we know little about what this outsourcing means for everyday family life. The study is based on interviews with 12 working mothers, with children aged from 9 months to 15 years, from different parts of Sweden who regularly outsource cleaning. Data was analysed with the critical discursive psychology framework. The analysis shows that mothers value both sons and daughters learning to care for the home, but children's actual participation seemed limited, often restricted to decluttering before the cleaners arrive. Outsourcing cleaning was mainly seen as a strategy to reduce stress, prevent conflicts and maximise family/quality time. Mothers expressed a dilemma between wanting their children to learn domestic skills and outsourcing cleaning to preserve family/quality time. Some stressed the importance of teaching their children to respect the cleaners and their work, while also problematising how cleaning was performed by lower-class, racialised workers. Overall, the study suggests that outsourcing is part of a renegotiation of the socialisation processes in the family, where domestic work is downplayed, while norms of career commitment, paid work, and family/quality time are reinforced, shaping children's orientations towards future citizenship.

Outsourcing domestic work is an established global phenomenon increasingly common in Sweden, especially since introducing the RUT reform offering tax deductions for domestic services. Little is known about Swedish families using domestic services. This article investigates the narratives of 12 Swedish women living in families using domestic services and what this means for their everyday family life. The results show that outsourcing in part is regarded as a solution to a gender equality problem as it relieves women from unpaid household work. However, the women’s narratives also reveal that even when domestic work is outsourced, the women continue to have the main responsibility for everyday family life. The article thus contributes insights into how gender equality in everyday family practices is negotiated when domestic work is outsourced.

This chapter analyses representations of the single father in Swedish internet-based forum discussions between 2014 and 2019. The discussions were organized into five themes, through critical discursive psychology. The results show that involved fatherhood was a taken-for-granted assumption and that previous experiences of relationships and children were seen as valuable assets, implying that the involved single father was (hetero)sexualized and regarded as a desirable type of masculinity. However, the involved single father was also discussed as a position difficult to combine with notions of 'the devoted boyfriend', and that the single father is unable to fulfil the ideal of 'parenthood/family virginity', which made him unattractive according to some discussants. The notion of the single father also intersected with notions of social class.

The aim of this paper is to analyse how Swedish grade three children are discursively positioned as pupils when they are taking national tests in mathematics and when they reflect on the testing situation afterwards. With support from theories about affective-discursive assemblages, we explore children's body language, emotions, and talk in light of the two overarching discourses that we believe frame the classroom: the 'testing discourse' and the 'development discourse'. Through the disciplinary power of these main discourses children struggle to conduct themselves in order to become recognized as intelligible subjects and 'ideal pupils'. The analysis, when taking into account how affects and discourses intertwine, shows that children can be in 'untroubled', 'troubled', or ambivalent subject positions.

Aim: Few studies have examined the parents of moderately preterm children. The aim of this study was to investigate the experiences of parents of both extremely and moderately preterm children. 

Methods: Qualitative telephone interviews were conducted in 2013-2014 with 13 mothers and 10 fathers of extremely preterm children and with 11 mothers and seven fathers of moderately preterm children. The children were born between 2000 and 2003. Data were analysed with a narrative approach. 

Results: Parents of extremely preterm children recounted dramatic birth stories that, for most, ended positively. Parents of moderately preterm children presented more neutral birth stories, and most recounted that their children did not receive attention for prematurity from medical staff. Parents from both groups described staff mem-bers’ treatment in terms of long-lasting impressions, and they were deeply affected by the hospital environment and the other parents and children admitted. Parents whose children died or were disabled recounted dramatic stories and endless fights for support. 

Conclusion: Parents from both groups reported long-lasting impressions of the medi-cal staff and the hospital environment, which they found important to talk about, even a decade after the birth of their child/children.

Aims and objectives: To explore how parents of preterm infants express the constructive aspects of their experiences. Using the notion of post‐traumatic growth as a back‐drop, this study supplements the research on parents' difficulties by providing a more nuanced understanding of what it is like to have a preterm child.

Background: Researchers have reported that parents feel afraid, worried, helpless, powerless, guilty and stressed, as well as that preterm birth can be associated with physical and psychological ill health among parents; however, a few researchers have found indications of post‐traumatic growth among parents.

Design: This study includes qualitative interviews and relates to COREQ guidelines for reporting qualitative research.

Methods: A total of 13 mothers and 10 fathers of extremely preterm children, as well as 11 mothers and 7 fathers of moderately preterm children, were interviewed. The data analysis was based on thematic analysis.

Results: The analysis resulted in six themes that describe various constructive aspects of having a preterm child: acceptance of the fact that events do not always occur as planned; gratitude and reconsideration of the situation; reappraisal of close relationships; reliance on one's own ability to deal with events; thankfulness for what one has; and openness to being exposed to various kinds of people and their experiences.

Conclusions: The parents recounted constructive aspects of their experiences such as an altered understanding of themselves, others and life itself. These themes provide a more nuanced way of understanding how parents can relate to having preterm children.

Relevance to clinical practice: This knowledge can help professionals to enable parents to activate their social network and to acknowledge their care for each other, as well as to help parents see beyond cultural ideals regarding childbirth and family life and to find their own solutions to everyday life.

This article discusses the rarely investigated learning processes of Swedish intra-professional police educators: police teachers, police supervisors and police field training officers. Through the interpretation of three interview studies conducted from a theoretical perspective of experiential learning, reflection and meaning-making, a new understanding of professional development as viewed through the eyes of an educator emerges. The findings exemplify how the empowerment of positive, reflexive and creative intentions amongst intra-professional police educators can be seen as an important component of preparing new police officers as well as developing the Swedish police force. Moreover, it will be implied that this particular process is driven by both intrinsic (the internal drive of the educators) and extrinsic (the educational context of the Swedish police) forces.

This article analyses and problematises central assumptions in Sweden's National Strategy for Developing Parenting Support, a document that addresses children's deteriorating psychological health. The analysis was performed with Bacchi's (2009) approach to policy analysis. The results show how parental determinism is expressed; psychological ill health among school-aged children is described as an individualised problem caused by insecure parents, who are represented as the most important persons in a child's life and, therefore, are considered to be risk factors that require continuous support. Evidence-based parenting support programmes in particular are described as a central tool for improving parents' sense of responsibility and parenting skills. While the strategy aims to offer all Swedish parents support, it underlines ideals that have been related to gendered, middle-class notions of parenting. The issue concerning children's psychological health is problematised and discussed in relation to parental determinism, the risk society, equality, equity and psychological health.