Japanese Parents Struggle to Balance Work and Childcare

Work or Quit?

A survey of Japanese parents found that many considered resigning from their jobs or actually did so, due to childcare. The survey was conducted by the job-information provider Mynavi in February 2025, targeting 800 men and women age 20 to 49 who are full-time employees or civil servants with children under elementary school age.

Among respondents who answered that they had either resigned from their jobs or considered resigning 41.3% were women raising their second child or later, while 38% were women experiencing motherhood for the first time. Meanwhile, 33.3% of men who already had older children had resigned or considered resigning, as compared to 18% among those without that experience. Overall, 35% of the respondents had at least considered resigning from their jobs, indicating the difficulty for men and women in balancing work and childcare.

When asked what is necessary to achieve their ideal way of working while raising children, the most common response among both men and women was to have weekends off. Among women, the second most common response to the question was to have a workplace environment where it is easy to take time off when pregnant or looking after children.

Between men and women there was a significant difference in the number of days of childcare leave taken. Whereas 60% of women were able to take more than a year of childcare leave, around 70% of men had to take less than three months. Roughly half of the men surveyed said that they would have liked to have taken more than three months leave. The survey results show that there is still a hard-to-bridge gap between people’s ideals and reality.

Data Sources

• Childcare survey (Japanese) from Mynavi, 2025.

(Translated from Japanese. Banner photo © Pixta.)