This article explores the sources of strain in family life among Japanese women in the post-childcare stage. It also examines the effect of work-related factors on such strain. Strain in family life is measured by family role overload. Analysis of National Family Research (NFRJ98) shows that working hours and type of life course significantly relate to a woman's family role overload. The longer the working hours, the higher the family role overload. Full-time workers who re-enter the labor force after a child-care period showed higher family role overload than those who continue working through a child-care stage/those who work parttime after returning to the labor force; and this relationship was especially clear among women who engage in professional/technical work and manual work. These results show that balancing work and family becomes especially difficult when women want to commit strongly to the labor force in the post-childcare stage. Prior research on the child-care stage has insisted that Japanese women leave the labor force to reduce the strain in family life. However, the results of this paper indicate that those behaviors have detrimental effects on the strain in family life at a later stage.

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The most prevalent coping strategy for the work-and-family conflict in Japanese families is for women to leave the labor market during the parenting period and come back later, when the children are grown. This study investigates the hazard rates of returning to the labor market for those who once left their jobs due to either marriage or childbirth. The data come from theSchool District Survey conducted in Central Japan in 1995 that surveyed 819 mothers of fourth and fifth graders. The sub-samples used for the analyses consist of 556 currently married women between the ages of 30 and 49 who left their jobs for one of the above reasons.
The results indicate that the negative impact of education on the rate of coming back to the labor force is due to the fact that women with higher education (especially those with four-year college diplomas) tend to marry husbands with higher incomes. The husbands' income that suppresses the probability of his wife's returning to the labor market was found to be particularly strong among four-year college graduates, suggesting a higher demand by them for time spent in non-pecuniary activities and a mismatch in the labor market.

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