To add to what @victorz@lemmy.world was saying above, you usually also have the right to work fewer hours if you have as small child (unpaid), but I'm not sure about the caveats. I work 75% through that mechanism. In my case it's not really a choice; if I'd work 100% like my wife too many chores wouldn't get done. I also wouldn't be able to do that on the amount of sleep and rest I'm getting (a few hours too few and almost none).

I should also add that you are explicitly only given subsidised childcare when doing paid wage work. You're not allowed to for example pop in and do some shopping on the way to pick-up, which I presume most people do anyway from time to time because who is going to check.

This system is nice in the traditionally social democrat smoke stack sense of allowing you and everyone else the freedom to do paid wage work at the factory and very little else. With a more or less private system you're paying for the service of "please take care of my children", which means that the marginal cost of "please take care of my child for an extra hour while I talk to my wife/go shopping/clean at home" is huge by comparison, but what you get for that is a greater degree of equality and availability.

I write the last part mainly to work against the stereotype of Sweden as a socialist utopia; sure this is a socialist policy, but it's a pretty boring one that's very 1950s.

Where I live the max daycare fee is 2110 SEK for two children, which we pay. It is based on income though, so you could pay less with less total monthly household income. The fee is 1,265.63 SEK for the first child and 843.75 SEK for the second child. There's a descending step system for the fee, per child, so the more children you have in daycare, the less you pay on average, per child. There's also some sort of tax reduction included with that price, like 20-25% or something. Can't remember exactly the details.