Education and Childrearing Decision-Making in East Asia

Abstract

Abstract Previous research on household labor has focused more on its physical participation and less on the mental and managerial responsibility. In this paper, using data from the 2006 East Asia Social Survey and the 2012 International Social Survey Program, we evaluate how couples made childrearing decisions and the role of relative education in shaping such decisions in urban China, Taiwan, and Japan. We find a dominant “co-pilot” model of childrearing decision-making among the urban Chinese with both husbands and wives participating, a “separate sphere” model among the Japanese with least sole decision-making by the husband, and a mixed model among the Taiwanese. Regardless of gender, the better-educated parent in China and Taiwan is more likely to take sole charge of childrearing decision-making. This suggests that the human capital of parents may play an increasingly salient role in parenting behavior in contemporary East Asia in the sense that the better-educated parent has a greater responsibility for making childrearing decisions while the gender boundaries become more blurred over time.