Swedish preschooling has gone through a remarkable development during the last 50 years. In the middle of the 1960s no more than 2 per cent of Swedish children under the age of 6 attended preschools or daycare centers, which can be compared with the situation today when the corresponding proportion is 86 per cent (Statistisk årsbok 1971-2014 & Skolverket.se). Earlier research on this process has either focused on the political parties’ attitudes towards welfare systems or more internal discussions on preschooling within the preschool sector (See e.g. Hinnfors 1992 and Folke-Fichtelius 2008; Hammarström-Lewenhagen 2013).In this paper I will focus on the attitudes towards preschooling as an alternative to parents staying home and taking care of their children. This is done by foremost analyzing debates in the Swedish parliament concerning the introduction of childcare allowances for parents taking care of their own children, as these debates often centered around the choice between preschools and daycare or letting parents stay home with their children.Results from this analysis show that the debate changed during this period, from being a question about giving women the opportunity to earn a living by full time employment to the possibility for children to attend preschool as part of their development in a democratic society. The debates that took place in the Swedish Parliament also entailed different lines of conflicts, such as how early childhood education and care should be organized. During the 1960s liberal and conservative parties argued in favor of small-scale family daycare while the left-wing parties favored daycare centers.In the 1980s the right for parents to choose between different forms of childcare became an important question as the result of the attempt to open commercial preschools in Sweden (Westberg & Larsson 2020). In that context the liberal and conservative parties argued in favor of state funded childcare vouchers that parents could use to either buy childcare or as childcare allowances for parents that stayed home to take care of their children. The left-wing parties on the other hand saw these reforms as something that would threaten both the efforts made towards gender equality and the expansion of the Swedish preschool system.As a result of the right-wing government that came into office in 2006 Swedish municipalities were given the opportunity to issue childcare allowances for parents that instead of sending their children (between one and three years old) to preschool took care of the children by themselves. This system was in place between 2008 and 2016, and was abolished by the left-wing government that took office in 2014. Since then the debate on childcare allowance in parliament has subsided. This can be seen in the light of the strong expansion of the preschool sector, which has resulted in that the vast majority of children attend preschool today.