The effects of nurturing environment on childbearing and childrearing behavior: A life course approach to Japanese urban dwelling mothers

Abstract

In 1992 we started a longitudinal study aiming to identify the maternal psychophysiological change relating to reproduction and childrearing. The subject mothers, who dwelled in the urban area of Tokyo Metropolitan, were asked to participate in the study at their regular antenatal check in the obstetric department. From 1992 to 1999 five studies were conducted for these subjects: gestation period (n=318), one month postnatal (n=230), three months postnatal (n=211), a year after childbearing (n=183) and six years after childbearing (n=55). This paper mainly dealt with the findings from the fifth survey, focusing on the following two issues: the association between the nurturing environment and childbearing behavior, and the impact of socio-economical change on psychophysiological adaptation of the mothers. We found that the stagnant economic status of the household resulted not only in high frequencies of maternal depressed mood and anxiety but also in retarded development of the partnership between the spouses. It was revealed that the economic bust in the early 1990's, which reduced household budget in Japan, indirectly worsened the childrearing condition of the subjects. The subjects whose mothers had been engaged in paid work had her first baby at younger age and wished to have more children than those whose mother had not. The subjects who had two or more siblings experienced more pregnancies and had more children than those who had one or no sibling. It was also revealed that a subject mother who had two or more siblings tended to consider it easier to bear and to rear children than her counterpart with one or no sibling. These facts indicated that the inter-generational transmission of fertility and fecundity between the subjects and their mothers. We concluded that the economic condition had impacts on the individual maternal adaptation and that the biological and socio-cultural components of reproductive behavior were transmitted over generations, although the sample size (n=55) may not be large enough to draw firm conclusions.