In present day Japan, child-rearing is the subject of debate on various occasions, along with issues such as the shortage of nurseries, child abuse and child-rearing neuroses and so forth. The background of these problems has been attributed to generally the lack of social support for parents, and they tend to be isolated from the rest of society. This social isolation of parents is also known as “isolated parenting,” and has become a social problem. With the advent of rapid industrial and economic growth in the country, the burdens of care work and housework has been largely laid on women, with the added influence of cultural notions of‘motherhood’and gender roles. This gender disparity has led to alarming trends of parental neurosis, child abuse, and over-involved parenting, combined with a drastic and continuous decline in fertility rate. In response to this situation, recent studies suggest reexamining the parenting styles practiced in pre-modern societies, such as “alloparenting” or “multiple parenting,” characterized by the involvement of multiple people other than the child's biological parents. This paper reviews the cases of multiple parenting documented through ethnography in the Polynesia islands, adoption practices of the Kawchodinne indigenous populations in Canada, and pseudo parenting and “village children” concepts in Japan, among others. Furthermore, it compares these practices to modern parenting styles and discusses the benefits and the possibilities of incorporating multiple parenting strategies to combat parental isolation in modern Japanese society
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