"POV: Your wife just breastfed for the last time." A man puts up garlands and bakes a cake in the shape of two breasts. His wife has been breastfeeding for a whole year and this is to be celebrated, in front of an audience on the internet. A new mother of two talks about her experience of "gender disappointment" and how she finally got used to the idea of another boy. A woman lists the girls' names that were nominated but didn't make it all the way; the actual name becomes its own section. When family life is to be meaningful, not only conflict and drama are required, but also new and increasingly specific rituals around couple formation, weddings and reproduction. Babymoons, dadchelor parties, filmed home births, "push gifts for all budgets" and entire accounts documenting the bundle's food journey from milk to solid food.
As the American journalist Fortesa Latifi writes in the book "Like, follow, subscribe" (2026), there are few things as lucrative for an internet mother as a steady stream of pregnancies, births and so-called milestones: "The algorithm loves babies." Partly it is of course my own fault that it looks like this on my phone. Apparently I'm so exhausted by my own family life that the only thing I can do is stare at other people's. And the flow learns quickly. "Momfluencing" and "sharenting" is a billion dollar industry.
But the ongoing family psychosis is bigger than social media. Just take the interest in genealogy. In a study from the University of Gothenburg, it is described how interest in commercial DNA tests has exploded into a "global phenomenon", and that it is precisely the idea of discovering specific family ties that attracts - rather than seeking confirmation of who one "is" in a national or ethnic sense. Sure, it's nice that people aren't driven by ethno-nationalist fantasies, but when did one's own family become the most interesting thing to do? After productions such as "Who do you think you are?", "Allt för Sverige" and "Genjägarna" SVT is currently looking for young people who have an "unanswered family riddle" for a new reality series. You know it's bad times when we're expected to crawl back into the womb as soon as we sit down in front of the TV.
"Are we now seeing an introversion, a bourgeois intimation in the style of 19th-century Biedermeier romance" asked the poet Malte Persson a couple of years ago (Expressen, 16/2, 2023). It seems so. In the autumn election campaign, the word "families with children" returned again and again, like a spell. The family with children is its own explanation, say "family with children" and we immediately understand that you are talking about something important. State expert groups are supposed to get us to have offspring, and newspapers go on reporting trips to exotic fertility hubs such as Småland's Sävsjö in search of the locality's "sexy secret" (Expressen, 26/9). It's been a long time since someone shouted "death to the family" even in jest, or dared to suggest that you might be able to live together in other ways.
The family with children is its own explanation, say "family with children" and we immediately understand that you are talking about something important.
The contemporary obsession with family really only has one exception – and that's the regular old exception. They have too many children. They are divided into clans. They want to bring the whole family here. Or maybe their closest ones anyway? Today, October 1, a series of changes regarding family immigration come into force. Among other things, the so-called contact person must wait for at least two years before it is even possible to apply to bring the family here. In pure Swedish, this means that a parent is forced to be separated from their children for two years before the issue can even be raised. In addition, the requirements for support are raised, so that those who, for example, want to be united with a spouse and two children must have an income of almost SEK 53,000 a month before tax. I don't know what you reading this earn, but I do know that this law change is a form of sadism.
In addition, the new maintenance requirement also applies when applying for an extended residence permit. A family that already lives here can therefore be torn apart if a parent becomes unemployed, receives a lower salary - or if the family has more children. The risk of deportation must be permanent, and built into the legislation. Please give birth to more children! No, not you.
At the bottom of this order lies not only a contempt for the international agreements Sweden usually brags about following. "Convention states must ensure that a child is not separated from his parents", it says in the Convention on the Rights of the Child - as well as that applications for family reunification must be "treated in a positive, humane and expeditious manner". Here also rests something deeper, and more grotesque. In an age obsessed with the family as a unit, forced division and separation becomes a way to point out who is fundamentally different. Who don't really need to be treated like a human being.
