A Study on the Social Support Network for Childbirth and Child Rearing

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Child bearing and rearing mothers need various kinds of social support. Many modern Japanese mothers, however, are isolated from the society and confined to home, and thus feel anxiety and loneliness during child rearing. To improve such situation it is required to clarify the conditions for social support network to exist, develop, and work. For this purpose we intended to describe each social network in daily life of the families and neighbors in the community, and compare the social network of representative cases of present mothers and that of a pre-war community where the life largely relied on mutual support.In the fiscal year 1999, we focused on the traditional social network and child rearing in a pre-war small mountain community in Ohshika Village, Ina Valley. An ethnogrphic analsis of the data collected through interviews and field surveys revealed that 1) the life depended on the social network based on equality and reciprocity and 2) the household members and the neighbors … More shared the responsibility of child rearing.In the fiscal year 2000, we focused on the social support network in a present urbanized area neighboring Hiroshima City. A qualitative analysis of the data collected through interviews with child rearing mothers revealed that 1) the mothers there have little netwark in the community and 2) they want to have it.In the fiscal year 2001, we carried out a set of two questionnaire surveys on child rearing mothers in an urbanized area neighboring Hiroshima City in order to find out the conditions of mothers decisive to their social network and support. Quantitative analyses with multivariate methods revealed that 1) the social support decreases with a) worries about the social level of the possible friends, b) shyness, and c) being jobless and 2) the mothers with jobs have lower anxiety of child rearing.These results indicate that the social support for child rearing mothers should be a holistic one based on the community and developed without assuming mothers to devote themselves exclusively in child rearing. Less