What School Closure Left in Its Wake: Contrasting Evidence Between Parents and Children from the First COVID-19 Outbreak

Abstract

To control the spread of COVID-19, the national government of Japan abruptly announced the closure of elementary schools on March 2, 2020, but preschools were exempted from this nationwide school closure. Taking advantage of this natural experiment, we examined how the proactive closure of elementary schools affected various outcomes related to family well-being such as the incidence of domestic violence and marital quality as well as outcomes for children. To identify the causal effects of the school closures, we exploited the discontinuity in the probability of “schooling” at a certain age (in months) and conducted regression discontinuity analyses. The outcomes were measured in both March and August 2020; on the latter occasion, we conducted large-scale online surveys of mothers whose firstborn child was aged 4 to 10 years. The results revealed a slight increase in physical domestic violence by wives in March, but this increase did not persist to August 2020. Furthermore, we found no significant effect in several measures of marital relationship and marital quality. By contrast, even in August, we found significant increases in children’s weight and social media usage as well as in mothers’ anxiety over how to raise their children. These findings together suggest that school closures have no lasting negative effects on marital quality but do have lasting negative impacts on children through lifestyle changes prompted by school closures.