Married Women’s Lifestyles in Japan: Disparities Based on the Number of Children

In order to explore the complex mechanisms of married women’s decisions in matters of childbirth, we studied empirically the relations between family size and aspects of lifestyle through a questionnaire survey administered in 2006 to married women living in the city of Suita, Japan, a suburb of Osaka. Lifestyle was taken as a complex of mutual relationships among individual (biographical, psychological) and social (socioeconomic, social support) factors, and our aim was to clarify differences in Japan in lifestyle among married women based on the number of their children. Analysis of 495 respondents showed mothers with only a single child were more self-reliant: they tend to give birth at a late age, enjoy cooperation with their husbands in family finances, be psychologically at ease, and not seek help from others in child rearing. Mothers with three or more children embody more of the traditional role for Japanese women: they tend to give birth at an early age, be reliant on their husbands financially, be less at ease psychologically, and seek others’ help in child rearing. These differences suggest that more focus on psychological, not just economic support in government policy to counteract declining fertility is an important issue for future consideration.