22.10.2002

japantoday > national

Two-thirds of working women quit jobs to have 1st child

TOKYO — Two-thirds of working women who gave birth to their first child in 2001 have since given up their jobs and taken on most of the child-rearing work, a ministry survey showed Monday.

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare polled the parents of just over 50,000 babies born last year as the start of the ministry's long-term effort to track the same subjects until the babies come of age.

Of the 16,850 mothers who remained unemployed after giving birth for the first time, 67.4% had been working a year before birthing, according to the survey.

Mothers who quit their jobs to give birth to their second child accounted for 34.5%, while 56.1% of the working mothers who gave birth last year had quit their jobs within a one-year period through their deliveries.

The survey showed that fathers' involvement in household and child-rearing work is limited, especially in meal preparation, dishwashing, child feeding, cleaning and washing work.

More than 70% of fathers surveyed said they never or almost never prepare meals or wash clothes even if their spouses have jobs, while more than 60% gave similar responses to dishwashing and cleaning work.

Most of the fathers surveyed are involved in bathing their babies, however, with 28.2% of the fathers working longer than 60 hours a week saying that they bathe their babies on a daily basis.

The survey also showed that while mothers who have taken a leave to raise children accounted for 80.2%, a dismal 0.7% of the fathers have done so.

The survey was conducted on the parents of 53,575 babies born between the 10th and 17th days of January and July last year, with valid responses obtained for 47,007 of them. It asked each mother's job status and each father's involvement in household and child-rearing affairs when their babies were 6 months old.

The survey will be used to help formulate a policy on how to deal with the declining number of children and devise ways to assist child-rearing activities.

"We want to keep surveying them until the children get married to see in what conditions the number of children will increase," an official of the ministry's demographics division said. (Kyodo News)

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