Abstract
Time allocation among high school students and their parents was analyzed on the basis of the data available from the 2001 Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities published by the Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The interrelations between the time use of high school students and their parents were studied by drawing up patterns of housework participation. The results of the study are as follows: 1) The housework hours by the students and those by their fathers put together were only around ten percent of the hours put in by their mothers. 2) Housework was shared by the tripartite members (father, mother & student) only in 2.1 percent of the families surveyed. The total amount of housework hours by the tripartite members were the longest and the hours only by mothers were the shortest. 3) The housework pattern analysis shows that the work hours of the fathers, who contributed to housework whether or not both parents had work to do and irrespective of the days of the week, were shorter than the work hours of the fathers who do not participate in housework; in other words, there existed a trade off between housework and non-housework. On the other hand, a similar trade off between housework and schoolwork was observed on the part of the students on weekdays. 4) How was mothers' time use affected by the participation or non-participation by the other members of the family? It was affected by their husbands' contribution to housework rather than the students', which, however, does not follow that fathers intended to reduce their wives' housework in order to give them longer free time.
