In Japan, when a parent takes childcare leave for a new baby, their older child may be forced to leave daycare.
This system, commonly known as the “childcare leave expulsion policy” (iku-kyuu taien), continues to place significant pressure on many families.
One comment online recently caught my attention:
“If daycare workers can watch multiple children at once, isn’t it just laziness to say you can’t manage two kids during parental leave?”
At first glance, this argument might sound reasonable. But it’s based on a serious misunderstanding.
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■Daycare and Home Life Are Both Childcare — But Under Completely Different Conditions
First, it’s important to recognize that daycare workers do not shoulder everything alone.
In a daycare center, there is an entire team: directors, lead teachers, assistant caregivers, administrative staff, kitchen workers, and cleaning staff. Responsibilities are clearly divided. Childcare workers can focus solely on supervising children within defined hours and age groups.
Home life is a very different story. For parents caring for children alone (“one-operation parenting” or wan ope ikuji), there is no support team. You are the caregiver, cook, cleaner, nurse, counselor, and parent — all in one. Everything that is divided among multiple professionals at a daycare must be handled by just one person at home.
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■Different Ages = Completely Different Needs
Daycare classes are usually grouped by age. This makes it easier to plan group activities and routines around similar developmental stages and interests.
But at home under this system, the children left in the parent’s care are usually of very different ages:
A newborn who needs round-the-clock feeding, diaper changes, and being held
A two-year-old in the middle of the “terrible twos”
A four-year-old who is developing social skills and wants to play with friends outdoors
Trying to meet all these needs simultaneously — alone — is incredibly difficult.
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■Who Designed This System in the First Place?
This leads us to a simple but important question: Who came up with this policy?
In reality, the people who make such policies are often middle-aged or older men — many of whom have never spent entire days caring for infants or toddlers.
Of course, not all men fall into this category. But policy-making spaces often lack input from:
Mothers and fathers struggling through solo parenting
People with firsthand experience raising siblings
Childcare workers or nurses who understand age-specific needs
The perspectives of those who are actually raising children are overwhelmingly missing.
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■Parental Leave Is Not “Free Time”
This system seems to be based on the mistaken idea that childcare leave is some kind of long vacation.
In reality, parental leave is not time off — it is a period to pause paid work in order to take on the full-time labor of protecting and raising a child.
Caring for a baby who cries nonstop, while helping an older child with toilet training, making meals, doing laundry, and waking up multiple times a night — it’s the kind of workload that even trained daycare professionals would find overwhelming.
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■What We Need Is Policy Based on Real Parenting
What families truly need is not abstract reasoning from a desk — but policy designed from lived experience.
Should the right to daycare really be decided solely by whether a parent is “home” or not?
What if that parent is home caring for three children of different ages, with no help, on little sleep?
To impose a rigid policy without considering those real conditions shows a lack of imagination — and a lack of respect for caregiving work.
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■Parenting is a lonely marathon.
If even professional caregivers would struggle in these conditions, why do we assume that ordinary parents can just push through?
This is a question that deserves wider attention.
If you found this article helpful, I would be very grateful if you could share it with others. Thank you for reading!
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#ChildcarePolicy #JapanParenting #ParentalLeave #GenderRoles #FamilySupport #Inequality #WorkingMoms #SocialSystems #ParentingRealities #ChildcareLeave
