“Both me and husband work hard but we hope to have our child in the future ”
“I dedicate my time to bringing up my child but I want to return to my work when my baby grows bigger.”
There are so many women who hope this way in Japanese society. However, the problem of “child on waiting list of kindergarten” is a factor to make women who are quite active in building up their career path in their business, feel anxious about tradeoff between working and bringing up a child.
It is really common case that a single mother are rejected to leave child or added to child waiting list by 30 or more kindergartens around where she lives. Even if a mother somehow find a kindergarten to look after her child, a kindergarten is located too far from her house to go there every morning.
Likewise, there are also the same problem in western countries like Netherlands and Germany. Korean child nursing problem is as serious as it is called “childcare chaos”
For the most part, when economic activity becomes more active and women’s social progress is stimulated, women have a tendency to have pressure between bringing up a child and their careers as a reaction commonly in the world.
Seeing percentage of financial disbursement towards public education, it is 3.5% in Japan. This number is the lowest rank in 34 countries joined in OECD. By the way, speaking of best 5 countries, the first rank is Norway (6.5%), the second rank is Belgium and Iceland (5.9%), fourth rank Finland(5.7%), Fifth rank is England(5.2%).
The low percentage of financial disbursement towards public education indicates that the degree of percentage that economic disparity of each household influences directly on educational inequality is quite high. In fact, Japanese university entrance rate is about 60 percent but mother-child and public assistance receiving households reach less than only 40 percent of its rate in 2015.
This issued is also reflected to child care in Japan.
Office worker’s household has no choice but to leave a child in licensed kindergarten subsidized by the government but in contrast, a household with sufficient financial leeway can afford to hire a babysitter. Moreover, burden of childcare and education expenses is put on single mother households as heavily as they need to do long-hour work and somehow find another extra job to do after finishing regular work.
But why do western countries with sufficient financial disbursement to public education have problem of “child on waiting list”?
In European countries, men can take maternity leave and there is a system to compensate the amount of income during this term. The reason why there is “child on waiting list of kindergartens” in spite of this governmental support is because there are so many people who hope to work in full time position, both husband and wife.
In contrast, Japan has rich kindergarten environment which is mostly supported by nursery teacher’s hard labor. This background brings on reduction of nursery teachers. That’s why children on waiting list is far from reduction.
Kindergarten is put in a terrible situation that forces nursery teacher to do overtime work without allowance in order to respond people’s demand such as early child care and overtime child care.
These burdens piles up on nursery teachers’ tasks and some of teachers quit due to this unbearable working environment. The rest of teachers increase more burden and some more teachers quit. Japanese child care industry now falls into this depressive spiral.
The Japanese government has made effort to raise up salary to encourage teachers and make their motivation not lose. In 2017 the government made an attempt to set original post of “ nursery expert” and “subhead nursery” and add extra 40,000 yen on monthly regular salary to veteran teachers who have worked for over 7 years. For those who has worked for 3 years, the government prepared the post of “section leader” and additional 5000 yen on monthly regular salary with a requirement of completing training.
However, even with this attempt, average monthly salary of child care industry is still 100,000 yen less than that of other industries.
As a result, this problem will connect to solution of how to steadily increase the number of nursery teachers as remaining childcare quality in Japan. If the Japanese government allocates financial disbursement to public education as the same level of European countries’, solution of the problem of “child on waiting list” somehow start moving forward.