【Aging, safety net and fiscal crisis in Japan】No.230: Mother & child households are threatened by COVID-19

Since 1986, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has conducted a basic survey on national life and divided the number of households into four types: elderly households, mother and child households, father and child households, and other households. An elderly household is made up of only people aged 65 or older, or a household in which an unmarried person under the age of 18 cohabits with the elderly. A mother and child household is one in which children (unmarried and under the age of 20) are raised by their mother and the father is absent. A father and child household is one in which children without a mother are raised by the father.

As shown in Table 1, the number of households increased by 35.8% from 37,544,000 in 1986 to 50,991,000 in 2018, while the population only increased by 3.9%. This is because the number of elderly households has increased by six times. These elderly individuals are the most physically vulnerable to COVID-19. However, it is the mother and child households (Figure 1) that are most threatened by the pandemic. Mothers with children attending elementary school or younger were forced to miss work during the school holidays. Moreover, in the service industry, where many work part time, the shift to a new normal business model is expected to take time because businesses may have shrunk due to the government's request for self-restraint. It is expected that if second and third waves of the pandemic hit under these circumstances, mother and child households will face even more difficult situations. Therefore, the government has to prepare a bailout policy in advance.

Table 1 Number of households

Figure 1 Number of Mother & Children households