Abstract
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.
Highlights
In 2020, many countries adopted policies to force citizens to stay home to mitigate the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic
We find that school closures decreased the mental health of mothers with children who were primary school pupils, which concurs with other COVID-19 work by Takaku and Yokoyama (2020) arguing that marital relationships deteriorated as a result of school closures
This study examined whether the mental health of mothers of primary school students was more likely to worsen than of fathers
Summary
In 2020, many countries adopted policies to force citizens to stay home to mitigate the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Under this restricted life, a question that arises is how and to what degree does the COVID-19 outbreak affect mental health? There is a gap in working from home between working mothers who have children of primary school age and other working women during the COVID19 spread (Yamamura and Tsutsui 2021a). The effect of school closures on parents’ mental health is unknown, as is whether this effect differs between mothers and fathers. This study examines the influence of school closure on parents’ mental health, focusing on gender differences among parents.
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