This paper examines how the mother-norm has changed by looking at the Maternal and Child Health Handbook from the war time to the present. Since the current child-rearing policy was established in the 1990s, the norm of dedicated childcare by full-time housewives has been criticized. Instead, participation of fathers in childcare has been encouraged. What is the most desirable way for those who are in charge of maternal childcare? Previous research on childcare media, which used administration documents and childcare magazines as an analytical framework, has pointed out that the modern mother-norm has been relativized since the 1990s. However, the administration documents are not familiar to childcare givers, and childcare magazines tend to depict what readers want to see. Therefore, I conducted a practical comparative analysis on the Maternal and Child Health Handbook, which is distributed to all pregnant women and is thus one of the most familiar public media for childcare givers, to see how the contents of the handbook have changed, and how the changes affect the mother-norm. The research revealed that the Maternal and Child Health Handbook replaced the word "mother" with "parents" from the 1990s to 2000s in order to show that childcare became more gender-neutral. Nevertheless, since the 1970s the Handbook has changed the contexts in which it has emphasized more advanced and child-centered childcare. Furthermore, the Handbook has increased the number of pages in the section where it requires childcare givers, mostly mothers, to write their inner feelings. Finally, this paper investigates how the MCHH overemphasizes the importance of a childcare giver's choices and will through the modern norm of "mother", which results in increasing a mother's burden.
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