If you were to ask me for the single thing I’ve done in my life of which I’m most grateful, the thing about which I have absolutely no regrets, it would be taking six months off work – twice – to look after my baby daughter and baby son. 

Sweden’s system of parental leave is one of the most generous anywhere in the world, with 480 days of shared leave per child, 390 of which are paid at 80 percent of your income. Fathers in Sweden take the highest proportion of state-funded paid leave in the EU.

In my opinion, it’s a foolish foreign father who fails to take full advantage of the opportunity. This is something you can hardly get away with – financially, socially or with regard to your career – anywhere else, so if you’re in Sweden and can do it, you absolutely should. 

It astonishes me to think that of the 50 years that have passed since the system was launched in 1974, almost a fourth have happened since I, myself, took over as the main carer of my six-month-old daughter, way back in September 2012. 

It all feels so fresh and recent, and that may be because the effects are still so much with me, particularly when I visit the UK and my experience, which here in Sweden feels so normal, suddenly seems exotic.

It used to annoy me when my brother’s friends described me as a “stay-at-home Dad” — as if I was some sort of career drop-out, rather than someone doing their fair share of a common task, or when women back in the UK instinctively tried to take basic parenting jobs off my hands, as if I were totally incapable.

This summer I travelled with my two children by rail to the UK – without their Swedish mother – spending time with my British family in West Wales. As always, I felt that even though my brother, brother-in-law and other UK fathers I met were mostly hands-on, engaged parents, my relationship with my children is a bit different. 

Nowadays they mainly see me as an awkward embarrassment. But they’re also still young enough that if they hurt themselves, or have a headache, or growing pains, they’ll come to me for comfort. 

They’ll still both plonk themselves down on my lap as I sit in an armchair, sprawling themselves awkwardly over me as if it were the most natural thing in the world. My daughter has a habit of absent-mindedly picking at the hairs growing out of my ears, like a juvenile ape. If they wake up in the night, they’ll still occasionally join me in bed.

That position – being a comfort parent, a nurturing one – is not one most fathers in the world enjoy. And the research does suggest that this closer, more intimate, bond, has long-term consequences. 

A Swedish study from 2008 found that the longer the leave that fathers took when their children were babies, the more they saw them later on in their lives, even if they had separated from the children’s mother. A Norwegian study has found that taking parental leave reduced conflict over domestic tasks and made men more likely to do a fairer (but not fair) share of the housework. 

Looking back, the months I spent as the main carer of my child, however exhausting they were, rank as some of the best of my life.

I quickly settled on a routine, which I stuck to religiously for six months, and wrote about in The Guardian newspaper.  

I would leave the house around 9am, hopefully with everything in the long list of essential items that needed to be packed with military precision, and make my way to Öppna förskolan, the “open preschool”, a haven for new parents at Familjenshus, or “Family house”, a midwife’s practice next to Malmö’s Folkets Park.

Inside, I would find dozens of young 30-somethings, with fathers in a slight majority, drinking coffee and chatting as their children, depending on their ages, lay still or crawled all over the floor, playing with plastic dinosaurs, Duplo, and wooden blocks. 

It may be because of the oxytocin – the so-called “cuddle hormone” – marinading our brains, but I found myself bonding to the other parents in a strangely intense way. Still today, about half of the friends I have in Malmö are people I met in that room, most of them couples, like us, with one Swede and one English-speaking foreigner. 

I became something of a clown: if I was late and they had shut the doors, I used to try and climb through the window, much to the irritation and, I like to think, amusement of Lisa and Karin, the duo who ran the centre. 

When it was Christmas, I brought a bottle of brandy, along with cream and a box of homemade mince pies – a British Christmas cake – so I could approximate the preferred English accompaniment, brandy butter. Bringing brandy to a kindergarten was, I was told, a total no-no in Sweden. 

But I also felt included. When Lisa, the guitarist in their musical duo, was ill, I was asked to step in, strumming along to Imse Vimse Spindel (Imsy Wincy Spider), Mamma, Pappa och Jag, and other classics you can find on their Spotify albums here and here. I’m fairly certain that half of the Swedish parents there could have done better than my schoolboy guitar.

As my babies normally fell asleep in the pram on the way home, I would then get an hour, maybe two, to myself, the only time off in the whole day. 

In the afternoon, I would meet up with some of the same people I knew from Öppna förskolan, and go to a language café at the local library in the hope of learning some Swedish. I remember my daughter being whisked away into the hands of the many Middle-Eastern women, being passed from one to the other and petted as I looked helplessly on, wondering if I’d ever get her back. 

When I was on parental leave with my son, I would spend afternoons in Folkets Park, Malmö’s wonderful amusement park, so my then two-year-old daughter could totter around in the playground. Again, I found it very sociable. There would always be someone there I knew, and we’d chat intermittently while keeping our children entertained. My wife quickly became bored of the park, and can now not enter it without feeling anxious and ill, but to this day, it has a special meaning for me.  

Parental leave wasn’t so new or exciting the second-time around and to my shame, I once managed to forget entirely that my son existed. I left the playground area chasing Eira, bumped into a friend and wandered off, leaving the 10-month-old infant holding himself up against a climbing net.

I realised with horror what I’d done ten minutes later, and then rushed back to find him in the arms of a helpful, but understably reproachful, stranger.

So what am I left with now? I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that my two periods of parental leave changed me more than any other event in my life.

Fathers in most parts in the world, unlike mothers, can keep one foot in their old lives, keep most of their focus on their job, continue to pursue their ambitions. But if you become the main carer for a baby, it is all-encompassing. 

For me, that meant the demolition of much of what I had cared about before having children, my ego and ambitions were pulled without warning to the absolute edge of my consciousness, my mental life and emotions instead entirely dominated by this tiny being.

I’ve found no longer being the centre of my own life strangely liberating, and it’s only now, more than a decade later, that my own dreams and goals — still unfulfilled and now probably unfulfillable — have awkwardly reemerged.

I do sometimes wonder if this might be one of the prices Sweden pays for gender-equal parental leave. Back in the UK, at least half of each couple (the men) can devote themselves in their entirety to fulfilling their ambitions, whether they be at work, in research, or in culture. But in Sweden men too have to make painful compromises. 

If there is an impact, it’s not an extreme one: Sweden still somehow punches above its weight in culture and research, and its big companies actively encourage male and female employees alike to take parental leave, which they wouldn’t if productivity saw alarming drops. 

As Sweden celebrates the 50th year of its revolutionary system, what strikes me most is how much of a constant it has been.

In my 12 years here, so much has changed. There’s been the “paradigm shift” on immigration, a loss of faith in the role of the private sector in education and welfare. The country has gone from being a poster-child for enlightened social policy to a warning of failed integration.

But no party seriously questions the value of generous parental leave. Let’s hope it lasts for another 50 years, ideally getting steadily more equal.

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