Breastfeeding practices and parental employment in Japan

Abstract

Much research shows that breastfeeding provides short-and long-term health benefits for both mothers and their children. However, few studies have yet investigated the factors which may promote or inhibit breastfeeding practices in Japan. To fill this research gap, this paper uses data newly gathered in 2012 on breastfeeding initiation and duration for each child of each mother, which enable us to estimate mother fixed-effects models that control for unobserved differences among mothers. Compared to mothers who leave their jobs after childbirth, mothers who return to work within a year after childbirth do not significantly differ in breastfeeding initiation but have a breastfeeding duration which is shorter by 1.654 months. On the other hand, when fathers work under a flextime system after childbirth, breastfeeding initiation is higher, and the duration is longer by 4.418 months. Therefore, letting fathers work under a flextime system would help promote breastfeeding practices in Japan.

Risk factors for discontinuation of exclusive breast feeding within 1month: a retrospective cohort study in Japan

“…Mothers who return to work after a year of childbirth left breastfeeding duration before mothers who left employment before childbirth. In addition, fathers with a flex time system work after childbirth, breastfeeding initiation increases and the duration of breastfeeding is prolonged, suggesting that work flex time could be a strategy to promote breastfeeding in Japan [ 17 ].…”

The effect of breastfeeding on young adult wages: new evidence from the add health

“…Second, we follow the approach of Fletcher (2011) by restricting the sample of siblings to those who reported equal treatment during childhood, which is comprised of 94 siblings with discordant breastfeeding histories. Third, to address the potential role of maternal employment as an important omitted variable (Kobayashi and Usui 2014;Chatterji and Frick 2005;Baker and Milligan 2008;Mandal et al 2014;Roe et al 1999), in the absence of The effect of breastfeeding on young adult wages: new… such employment information in the Add Health, we restrict the sample to monozygotic and dizygotic twins. 7 Table 1 presents the means for each of the variables we use in our full (Panel A) and sibling samples (Panel B).…”

University Employment Quality Evaluation System Based on Multicriteria Decision and Data Analysis

“…e concept of employment quality was initially introduced in the 1990s, and it is still an emerging research field [3]. As Sen Gupta said, it is difficult to define and measure the quality of employment [4]. In fact, there is currently no consensus on the connotation of employment quality.…”