Mother's Employment and Family Relations

The number of employed women is increasing every year in Japan. Nowadays 67.8% of employed women are married including divorced and widowed. Still, the curve of the proportion of working women by age shows that it has twin peaks in the 20-24 and 40-49 age groups and has bottom in the 25-34 age group. The wide spread idea is that children should be raised by mother particularly while they are young. Almost of mothers who have young child still don't want to be employed outside because of anxieties over negative influences on their child. The research concerning effects of mother's employment on families had started in the 1960s in Japan. This review focuses on consequences, rather than determinants, of mother's employment for families. The research for the past two decades can be divided into three types. The first is a fact finding research with no theoretical hypothesis. The second is a research verifiying hypothesis. The last one is the mixed. A number of reports concerning employed mother and their children deals only with two levels - the mother's employment status and a child life, such as TV waching hour s, after school activities and participation in the household chores. A few reports concerning marital relations examined the dependent variabls, recognition of the division of roles between the sex and the marrital satisfaction. The most distressing aspect of the current resarch situation in Japan is the luck of theory, just as Hoffman L.W. pointed out on U.S. research situation 15 years ago