Yamamura Eiji, Tsustsui Yoshiro
Department of Economics, Seinan Gakuin University, 6-2-92 Nishijin, Sawaraku, Fukuoka, 814-8511 Japan.
Department of Sociology, Kyoto Bunkyo University, Kyoto, Japan.
J Popul Econ. 2021;34(4):1261-1298. doi: 10.1007/s00148-021-00844-3. Epub 2021 Jun 8.
The spread of the novel coronavirus disease caused schools in Japan to close to cope with the pandemic. In response to the school closures, parents of students were obliged to care for their children during the daytime, when children usually were at school. Did the increase in the burden of childcare influence parents' mental health? Based on short panel data from mid-March to mid-April 2020, we explore how school closures influenced the mental health of parents with school-aged children. Using a fixed-effects model, we find that school closures led to mothers of students suffering from worse mental health compared to other females, while the fathers' mental health did not differ from that of other males. This tendency is only observed for less-educated mothers who had children attending primary school, not for those with children attending junior high school nor for more-educated mothers. The contribution of this paper is showing that school closures increased the inequality of mental health between genders and parents with different educational backgrounds.
新型冠状病毒病的传播导致日本学校关闭，以应对这一疫情。为应对学校关闭，学生家长不得不白天照顾孩子，而孩子通常白天是在学校的。育儿负担的增加是否影响了家长的心理健康？基于2020年3月中旬至4月中旬的短期面板数据，我们探究了学校关闭如何影响有学龄儿童的家长的心理健康。使用固定效应模型，我们发现与其他女性相比，学校关闭导致学生的母亲心理健康状况更差，而父亲的心理健康状况与其他男性并无差异。这种趋势仅在孩子上小学的受教育程度较低的母亲中观察到，孩子上初中的母亲以及受教育程度较高的母亲则未出现这种情况。本文的贡献在于表明学校关闭加剧了不同性别以及不同教育背景的家长之间心理健康的不平等。
