A group led by Haruka Kasamatsu, the research coordinator of the Toyama Unit Center for the Eco-Children Survey at the University of Toyama, examined the relationship between the length of working hours of fathers and the frequency of child-rearing behavior, and found that the longer the working hours of fathers, the less likely they were to engage in child-rearing behavior.
In recent years, the situation in which mothers handle childcare and household chores all by themselves is called "one-operate childcare," and is viewed as a problem.In a previous research report, this group also pointed out the danger that mothers' psychological distress would increase if childcare became one-off childcare by the mother alone.
In this study, we focused on fathers' working hours as a factor that hinders fathers' child-rearing behavior, and examined the relationship between fathers' working hours and child-rearing behavior by collecting information from 43,159 couples participating in the "National Survey on Children's Health and Environment (Eco-Children Survey)."
For fathers' working hours, we used the results of fathers' own answers about working hours per week.Fathers' child-rearing behavior was defined as 1 items such as ``changing diapers'', ``bathing'', and ``putting children to sleep'', and the results of mothers' answers about the frequency with which fathers worked on these 7 items around 6 months of age were used.
As a result, it was confirmed that in all of the seven child-rearing behaviors that were examined, the longer the working hours, the more likely they were to "not" doing so.In particular, fathers who worked more than 7 hours a week were more likely to "not" do any activity.
本解析対象者約43,000人の父親のうち、労働時間が週55時間超65時間以下の人が16.2％、65時間超の人が15.2％いた。本データの取得時（2011～2014年）は、1週間の法定労働時間を40時間とする法改正（2019年）の前であるため、現在は当時よりも人々の労働時間が短縮されている可能性があるが、データ当時に現在の法定基準以上の労働をしていた父親たちは、子育てに割く時間が非常に制限されていたことがうかがえる。
This study is a valuable result that shows the result that the working hours of fathers are related to child-rearing behavior, which is close to the physical sense, from a large-scale research group that actually covers the whole of Japan.In the future, we will collect data on the current working hours of fathers and the child-rearing situation again, and consider the appropriate working hours of fathers during the child-rearing period.
