Child-Rearing Supports for Urban Families in Japan

For decades, child-rearing in Japan has been shaped by the male-breadwinner family model and familialism. Even now, more than half of mothers in dual-parent families with preschool children are not working, and gender role division of child-rearing is still persistent. Moreover, social changes such as urbanization, the trend toward nuclear families and individualization have weakened informal child-rearing supports from kin and neighborhood. Consequently, “isolated child-rearing” at home has been causing problems of anxieties and burdens of child-rearing, especially among full-time mothers in urban areas.

Since the 1990’s, the Japanese government has introduced the child-rearing support policies as a measure of recovering the birthrate. From the beginning, its main focus was to supply day-care services to working mothers. In the 2000’s, the policies were further developed and the social support services for full-time mothers have been gradually expanded.

In this presentation, I focus on the child-rearing supports for the full-time mothers who are taking care of infants. Based on a qualitative investigation on Japanese urban families, I examine the functions of the child-rearing supports provided by various social actors such as public institutions, NPOs and local communities. In particular, I focus on the facilities called “child-care salons,” which are the open play rooms for infants and parents, and I analyze the features of these salons by comparing the types of assistances and the informal support networks they provide.

In short, these salons enable to extend the space of child-rearing from a home to the outside and increase social supports from various actors, though their functions differ in some aspects. However, these support measures have limitations and challenges in terms of gender roles in child-rearing and the concomitant roles of parents to take advantage of them.