“When surveys ask elderly Swedes whether they prefer to be dependent on their own adult children or the state,” Trägårdh told me, “they say the state. If you rephrase the question and ask if they’d like their children to visit them, they all say yes. So it is not that the elderly in Sweden don’t want to have relationships with their children. It’s that they don’t want to see them on terms and conditions where they are being reduced to a state of dependency in relation to their own children.”
