Eight Swedish men, all fathers, sit together in a circle in a rural farmhouse. They hum with their eyes closed, while the autumn light fades outside the window. One of them gently strums an acoustic guitar. The others hold little wax candles. Close by, someone stirs a huge pot of vegan hot chocolate.
This “cacao ceremony” culminates with the fathers revealing their innermost emotions and fears while crying. The spectacle looks like an extremely twee ayahuasca ritual, in which the only stimulant is hot chocolate and the only catharsis comes from the “spiritual energies” that get released when like-minded heterosexual men start talking about how much they love one another.
The scene occurs in the climactic final episode of Three Dads, a new Swedish documentary that’s caused explosive reactions across that country since it aired last November. The series follows three young fathers living in the progressive southern suburbs of Stockholm as they organize a “dad retreat” and discuss their innermost feelings about parenting. When they’re not baring their souls, they hug, do naked pushups together, listen to the Polyphonic Spree, and complain that “there’s just so damn much gender inequality out there.” Many viewers felt it was so cringey that they weren’t sure if they should take it seriously, and several Swedish TV critics even speculated that it might be some sort of Christopher Guest mockumentary—Spinal Tap, but for fathers.
The three dads, Jonas Mandelstam, Jon Oskarsson, and Linus Lundkvist, first rose to fame after they made a viral video on YouTube launching their dad retreat. Like much viral content, theirs was shared mostly by people who hated it.
“This makes me want to bomb Stockholm,” said one online commenter. “I’d rather have an absent dad than one of these dads.”
“All of Sweden hates Three Dads,” wrote another.
The show didn’t just annoy Swedish viewers, though—it wholly divided them. Three Dads has become a sensation during a winter of political turbulence, where there’s been an emerging sense that the culture wars are only getting started. To social conservatives and right-wing nationalists, the show represented everything they loathe about urban liberalism and the preciousness of contemporary Swedish culture. Among liberals and feminists, many questioned whether these dads should perhaps spend more actual time with the kids, rather than simply discussing fatherhood in a distant rural cabin.
The show became such a hot topic that national Swedish TV station SVT even organized a live debate last November with dozens of participants and hundreds of audience members to discuss whether the show reflects a possible “crisis of masculinity.” Politicians, activists, high school students, scholars, and both feminist and anti-feminist pundits all contributed to the discussion, which culminated in a prominent right-winger struggling to hold back his contempt for the three dads and their approach to parenting.
“I would never, ever do anything like that,” he seethed, “sitting in a circle, hugging men I hardly know, discussing emotions. What we need in this society is more men who show strength. Not more men who show vulnerability.”
It helps to know what he was reacting to. In recent years, the progressive Swedish dad has become a global archetype, either as the gold standard of gender-equal parenting or the dreaded harbinger of softer masculinity and subverted gender roles. Much of this stems from Sweden’s famous 16-month paid parental leave—Swedish parents are entitled to 480 days of leave, which is either split between both parents for 240 days each or doled out entirely to single parents. This gives Sweden one of the highest populations of stay-at-home dads in the world. Since the implementation of paid parental leave for both parents almost 40 years ago, Swedish fathers have gone from taking less than 1 percent of all parental leave in 1974, to 30 percent in 2021. All this extra paid time at home gives many of these dads an opportunity to be more involved in domestic responsibilities and parenting, but as the debate showed, some Swedes are unhappy with this less traditional dynamic. Involved fathers are often derogatorily referred to in international media as the country’s legion of “gay nannies” or “latte dads,” jabs generally doled out by those who see leisure time spent with one’s children as “unmanly.”
Much contemporary Scandinavian culture deals with the increasing self-awareness of fatherhood. Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Force Majeure captures the awkward moment when a father abandons his family as an avalanche approaches their Alpine village, a choice that sparks conversations about masculinity, fatherhood, and responsibility. And in the acclaimed autobiographical novel My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgård walks around with a stroller in a Swedish town when he suddenly sees himself from the outside as a kind of walking stereotype: “A bunch of Japanese tourists stopped across the street and pointed at me, like I was leading a circus parade or something,” he writes. “They pointed their fingers. There goes the Scandinavian man! Watch and tell your grandchildren about this incredible sight!”
The topic of Scandinavian family policy came up a few years ago when I interviewed the author Zadie Smith, a friend of Knausgård. She had just decided to move back to the U.K. after a decade in the U.S. Her reason wasn’t Trump or the pandemic but the lack of decent family policy in America, and the strange ways in which this warps all parenting and school culture, even in progressive parts of the country.
Smith talked about how the relative success of gender equality in Sweden and neighboring Scandinavian countries is not because Swedish men just happen to be more decent than anywhere else—it’s because there’s a political system that incentivizes shared responsibility for parental duties and rewards gender equality.
In the U.S., family policy often seems to be guided by the opposite principle: sustaining inequality and maximizing pain for parents. The U.S. is the only OECD country that doesn’t guarantee paid family leave; in addition, child care costs are exorbitant, and reproductive rights are under attack nationwide. Within this culture, it’s difficult for many American parents to maintain their professional status without sacrificing their parental responsibilities, and the burden tends to fall especially hard on women. As one 2021 op-ed in the Gender Policy Journal pointed out, American women “continue to take on the majority of domestic household duties and are more likely to sacrifice careers to compensate for family needs than men. In fact, the shortage of work-family policy in the U.S. maintains gender bias against women in the workplace and upholds gendered societal power hierarchies.” American mothers make less money for every child they have, and they’re often discriminated against in professional settings. Not much has been done to change this.
Sweden’s hardly perfect, but compared with America, it’s a haven of equality. Few countries have been more successful at institutionalizing feminist ideas at a governmental level—there’s been a minister for gender equality since 1973, and up until 2022, Sweden’s state department instituted a so-called feminist foreign policy. This boosted spending on gender equality efforts abroad, delivered gender-responsive humanitarian assistance to those in need, and led the Swedish government to increase the number of women serving as ambassadors to nearly half of all positions. Domestically, Sweden also has an “equality bonus,” meaning that couples who share parental leave equally get more of it.
This emphasis on gender parity also seems to be correlated with general happiness among parents. In the famous 2017 study “Parenthood and Happiness: Effects of Work-Family Reconciliation Policies in 22 OECD Countries,” social scientists Jennifer Glass, Robin W. Simon, and Matthew A. Andersson revealed that happiness decreases rapidly in the U.S. when adults have children but increases in Sweden, Norway, and Finland—three countries with more generous child care and family leave policies and greater rates of gender equality.
In spite of all this, many Swedes claim that the country is in the grips of a masculinity crisis. Anti-feminist demagogue Jordan Peterson has sold more than 100,000 books in Sweden and regularly gives talks at massive sports arenas. And in Sweden’s 2022 national election, a coalition of nationalist and right-wing parties won in large part due to their overwhelming support from young men. With a new, socially conservative government, Sweden’s feminist foreign policy was quickly scrapped.
Increasingly, Sweden seems to be fomenting a dark, growing undercurrent of suppressed rage at an imaginary matriarchy. You can see this in another passage from Knausgård’s My Struggle, in which he suggests that many of the Swedish men who spend their days changing diapers and pushing strollers are actually deeply nostalgic for a different past, with more-traditional gender norms: “I walked around Stockholm’s streets, modern and feminized, with a furious 19th century man inside me,” he writes.
Naturally, the TV debate on Sweden’s “masculinity crisis” featured plenty of men with similar grievances. At one point, a right-wing pundit was asked to define what makes a good man. He looked uncomfortable but eventually settled on an obtuse answer: “It’s important to set firm limits.” When asked to specify, he said, “For example, on immigration.” A conservative psychiatrist then made a convoluted argument about “why we need to talk more about toxic femininity.”
Eventually, we got to hear from the show’s three dads themselves. The most articulate of them, Jon Oskarsson, was the only one who seemed to have thought about the question before he entered the studio.
A decent man, he said, needs to have two qualities. The first is “being present”—the simple art of showing up. For the second, he used a Swedish word that’s harder to translate: lyhörd. It’s usually translated as “responsive,” but that doesn’t cover its richness: The fuller meaning of the word is to be someone who’s intuitive and attentive to another person’s needs, whether that person is your child or your partner. The word suggests an ability to hear something that isn’t fully audible, to be sensitive to your surroundings, and aware of the unspoken needs of your family. It means empathy, turned into a tangible act of caring.
But as we see in Three Dads, Oskarsson doesn’t always live up to his own principles. His wife ends up leaving him, maybe in part because he spends his weekends therapeutically stirring a pot of hot cocoa with his fellow dads rather than living up to the commitment of being present. As one of the mothers in the series says, “Maybe we don’t need to talk about every emotion.”
Perhaps she’s right—a lot of the conversations in Three Dads are just self-indulgent babble. There’s an annoying lack of discussion on the challenges of day-to-day parenting, and the practicalities of fatherhood seem to interest the dads far less than the theories behind it. Still, the way the documentary launched a nationwide debate speaks to an urgent need for more conversations on fatherhood, especially the kinds that fall outside the “traditional” range.
In Sweden, the cultural critic Nanna Olasdotter Hallberg had the most sanguine response to Three Dads. Yes, it’s often painful to watch their weird antics, she wrote in the Swedish newspaper Expressen, “but at least the dads are trying. They do their utmost to be good parents. The men’s great ambitions for their fatherhood take place in a cultural vacuum where the three fathers are forced to define on their own what it means to be a father today.”
In other words, the Three Dads might be cringey, but at least they’re taking baby steps toward a more interesting discussion on fatherhood. I might disagree with their chosen path to enlightenment—and I wince when they rebrand mindfulness as dadfulness—but the documentary has sparked new conversations on fatherhood across Sweden, filling a cultural void at a time when the country seemed to be struggling after a polarizing election.
It’s not hard to find practical advice and self-help books on fatherhood, but it’s rare to find fathers who publicly deal with the emotional journey of becoming a parent. In the final episode of the docuseries, in which Oskarsson finally gets to host his cacao ceremony, he earnestly tells a friend: “If you stir the cacao when you’re happy and loving, it will be a loving cacao. But if you’re angry and you’re only adding hate, it will become something else.”
I’m not sure cacao works like that, but it’s decent advice for parenting.
