Abstract
This study examines high school students’ thoughts about being parents after participating in a parenthood education program. A total of 1,295 students from six high schools in Japan answered an open-ended questionnaire about “being a parent yourself”. The students’ grade, gender, family structure, experience of interaction with infants, and feelings of being loved were recorded. Text mining analysis was conducted: overview analysis was performed using co-occurrence network and feature word analysis. The co-occurrence network analysis yielded 11 topics, with topic 1, “It must be hard and I feel anxious but it seems fun and joyful,” emerging as a positive aspect of becoming a parent. The results of the feature word analysis indicated that boys, students who had little interaction with infants and toddlers, and students with less “sense of being loved,” wrote Topic 3 “We shouldn’t think it’s simple and easy to raise children because we need to be responsible and prepared to cherish and nurture them”, and that they focused more strongly on the need for a sense of responsibility as a parent than on positive feelings about becoming a parent. Child abuse prevention support for pre-parental youth should include opportunities to interact with parents of infants and toddlers.
