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Effect of Mothers’ Nonstandard Work Hours on Children’s Wellbeing in Japan

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Family, Work and Wellbeing in Asia

Part of the book series: Quality of Life in Asia ((QLAS,volume 9))

Abstract

Despite concerns over inequality of children’s well-being, an increasing proportion of mothers work nonstandard hours. However, the effects of such work on the well-being of children is poorly understood in Japan. In the present study, analysis of time use data confirmed a rising proportion of mothers working nonstandard hours in the period of 2001–2006. Single mothers were found to be more likely to work nonstandard hours than their married counterparts. While educational aspirations for their children affect a single mother’s decision to work nonstandard hours, economic hardship was identified as a major determinant for married mothers. In Japan, a mother’s time spent with her children and her frequency of having dinner together with her children decrease if she works in the evening, and the magnitude of the decrease was found to be larger for single mothers. These findings suggest that prevalence of nonstandard work hours among mothers may have detrimental effects on their time spent with their children.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Using the same data set (NSHC), Raymo et al. (2014) analyzed the time mothers in Japan spend with their children. While their main focus was the effect of living arrangements and support from grandparents, they did not identify the mothers’ working times.

  2. 2.

    Unless otherwise noted, statistics that are referred to in this paper are based on the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s National Survey on Single-mother Households in 2011.

  3. 3.

    Other than the difference in surveyed years, discrepancies in the proportion of mothers at work between Table 1 and Fig. 1 can be attributed to the following: (i) the NSHC asks usual work patterns of mothers without specifying the date and day of the week, while the STULA surveys people’s time use of 2 consecutive days in October, (ii) the NSHC asks respondents about the timing of work using four categories, while the STULA surveys respondents’ activities in 15 min intervals; and (iii) single mothers who work nonstandard hours (especially night time) may have refused to answer the STULA.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (Grant Number: 26380358). The NSHC and STULA data for this secondary analysis were provided by the Japan Institute of Labour Policy and Training, and the Research Center for Information and Statistics of Social Science, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, respectively.

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  1. Graduate School of Social Sciences, Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho, Inage-ku, Chiba, 263-8522, Japan

    Akiko Sato Oishi

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  1. Akiko Sato Oishi
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Correspondence to Akiko Sato Oishi .

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  1. Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    Ming-Chang Tsai

  2. Department of Sociology, National Taipei University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Wan-chi Chen

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Oishi, A.S. (2017). Effect of Mothers’ Nonstandard Work Hours on Children’s Wellbeing in Japan. In: Tsai, MC., Chen, Wc. (eds) Family, Work and Wellbeing in Asia. Quality of Life in Asia, vol 9. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4313-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4313-0_8

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