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The wall for mothers with first graders: availability of afterschool childcare and continuity of maternal labor supply in Japan

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Abstract

In Japan, the availability of afterschool childcare for young school children is quite limited, although many preschool children attend daycare centers. As a result, parents experience a sudden lack of formal childcare when their child starts school. This dearth of childcare services is notorious, and has been referred to as the “Wall for Mothers with First Graders”. To illustrate the quantitative impacts of the Wall, I compare the maternal labor supply between nuclear and three-generation households at the time of the firstborn child’s school entry. Since mothers from three-generation households generally substitute formal afterschool childcare with informal childcare provided by the grandparents, I hypothesize that the first child’s school entry mainly affects the labor supply of mothers from nuclear households. Using the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, a difference-in-differences/event-study analysis is applied to the sample of mothers whose firstborn child was in daycare as a preschooler. The overall findings are generally consistent with my hypothesis. First, the baseline result shows that the labor market participation rate decreases by 10.9 percentage points at the time of their firstborn child’s school entry among mothers from nuclear households compared with those from three-generation households. Second, the firstborn child’s school entry decreases his/her mother’s daily paid work by about half an hour and increases time allocated to housework and childcare by the same amount. Taken together, this study shows that the shortage of afterschool childcare among nuclear households interrupts maternal labor supply.

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Notes

  1. Aizer (2004) shows that self-care after school is associated with an increased risk of behavioral delinquency such as skipping school and use of alcohol and drugs. Blau and Currie (2006) also review the existing results on the effects of self-care on children’s outcomes.

  2. German schools are open only in the morning and do not start or end at the same time every day.

  3. The number of newspaper reports on the “Wall for Mothers with First Graders” in the past five years exceeds 200 in the major five newspapers (i.e., the Asahi, the Mainichi, the Sankei, the Nikkei and the Yomiuri). For a newspaper article written in English, see Japan Times (2016).

  4. As is pointed out in Asai et al. (2015), many previous studies in Japan are based on cross-sectional comparisons among prefectures (Unayama 2011; Abe 2013) and find strong correlations between childcare availability for preschool children and maternal employment. Using Internet-based questionnaire surveys combined with geographical information on childcare centers in Tokyo, Kawabata (2014) also finds childcare provision for mothers with children under three years old promotes their participation in the labor market. However, Asai et al. (2015) show that these results from a cross-sectional framework can be severely biased by showing that childcare availability is uncorrelated with maternal employment when prefecture-level fixed effects are controlled.

  5. Crowding-out effects seem to be large in a country with high co-residence rate as in Japan. Childcare provided by grandparents is also common in the US. According to Ho (2015), one-fifth of children aged below five with employed mothers benefit from grandparent provided child care as their main source of daycare.

  6. Barua (2014) examines the effects of “childcare provided by school” and finds that a one-year delay of school enrollment, generated by the changes in the school entry cutoff date, is associated with a reduction in maternal labor supply.

  7. The share of children who stay at home as preschoolers is only 1.9% at the age of 5.

  8. According to an international comparative survey (OECD 2011), 80–90% of children in Nordic countries such as Denmark and Sweden use out-of-school-hours care services, while the rate is only 11.2% in Japan.

  9. The Longitudinal Survey of Adults in the 21st Century conducted by Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) asks about the current utilization of formal afterschool childcare for each child, but does not survey applications. Therefore, it seems to be impossible to find a near-random situation on the utilization of formal afterschool childcare.

  10. For example, Havnes and Mogstad (2011) exploit regional differences in the expansion of childcare in Norway to evaluate the impact of childcare on maternal employment, but this type of identification is not feasible here.

  11. Note that Japanese mothers cannot postpone the school admission date (April 2 at the age of six) under the mass schooling system. In fact, the school admission date is strictly enforced with almost complete compliance in Japan (Kawaguchi 2011). The low exemption rate is in sharp contrast with the situation in the US, and indicates that Japanese mothers are generally unable to adjust the timing of school entry to account for their working conditions and their children’s circumstances.

  12. Since the timing of intervention (i.e., school entry) varies across observations, my research design can be regarded as event study analysis (Stevenson and Wolfers 2006).

  13. θi absorbs the average differences in the maternal labor supply variables between nuclear households and three generation households.

  14. Since the individuals’ FEs are controlled for, effects of childbirth are correctly adjusted by including number of children. In addition, it is possible that the birth of younger sibling coincides with the firstborn child’s school entry at the age of six and the presence of two young children may affect the labor supply of mothers in nuclear and three-generation households differently. However, 31% of mothers in my data have only one child when the firstborn child starts school. In addition, the average age difference between siblings is about 4 years. Thus, coincidence of firstborn child’s school entry and birth of the youngest child is not of much relevance in my analysis.

  15. Unfortunately, the JPSC surveys only the “total” number of children who attend kindergarten or daycare centers in a household, without specifying who is in kindergarten and who is in daycare. I assume that a firstborn child is enrolled in kindergarten if the total number of children in kindergarten is larger than one, and otherwise he/she is defined as a user of a daycare center. This method seems to be plausible because there are few parents who use both kindergartens and daycare centers for their children during the same year. In my data, 2% of the mothers with preschool children used both during the same year.

  16. For example, follow-up rate from t-1 to t+4 is 76% for mothers from nuclear households and 77% for those from three-generation households.

  17. I do not adjust the nominal income data, but price level in Japan from 1993 to 2012 was very stable. For example, the Consumer Price Index for all items was 97.1 in 1993 and 96.2 in 2012.

  18. Among mothers with high education, 36% are regular employees, but this is only 24% among mothers with lower education.

  19. Since one of the eligibility criteria for the use of formal afterschool childcare (i.e., gakudou) is long working hours of both father and mother, female regular employees with school-age children are more likely to be eligible for formal afterschool childcare. Specifically, parents can report their working hours and employment status during the past few months to the municipality’s local welfare office, and this office judges whether they are eligible for gakudou.

  20. 1 USD = 114 JPY. I also implemented the same regression after taking the natural log of income, but the result remained unchanged.

  21. In order to obtain meaningful results on this issue, it seems to be useful to split the sample into working and non-working mothers. However, I do not have stable results from this subsample analysis because of the small sample size.

  22. 5.7 h × 10.9 percentage points = 0.62 h. In this mechanical calculation, I assume that all working mothers work for the same number of hours and that the working hours of mothers who exit from the labor market change from 5.7 h to 0 h.

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported by a competitive grant from the Japan Center of Economic Research (JCER). I also thank the Institute for Research on Household Economics for the use of the JPSC. I thank Michihito Ando and Junya Hamaaki for comments and suggestions. I also greatly appreciate valuable comments from two anonymous referees. The views expressed in this article do not reflect the official views of the JCER and the Institute for Health Economics and Policy. All errors are my own.

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    Reo Takaku

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Takaku, R. The wall for mothers with first graders: availability of afterschool childcare and continuity of maternal labor supply in Japan. Rev Econ Household 17, 177–199 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-017-9394-9

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