Abstract
This chapter examines how co-residence with adult children affects the levels of parental satisfaction in Japan. Our empirical evidence suggests that parents are more likely to be dissatisfied with their life and marriage when they live with an adult child. The gender analysis reveals that mothers (fathers) are more likely to be dissatisfied with the co-residence with an adult son (daughter), but fathers (mothers) are likely to be indifferent. Importantly, parents who co-reside with an unmarried adult child are more likely to be financially distressed.
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Notes
- 1.
Figure 12.1 appears to suggest that women are more independent than men, but this interpretation is a little misleading as women marry earlier than men on average.
- 2.
- 3.
It could be argued that the appropriate control group should not be single adult children living separately from their parents, but single adult children who live separately, but near their parents. The NFRJ data set does contain information on how far each child lives from his/her parents, so we leave using this alternative definition of co-residency as a matter for future research.
- 4.
It is worth noting that out-of-wedlock births are rare in Japan. According to Table 4.31 is e-Stat (2013), out-of-wedlock births in Japan are only 2.2 %. In our data set, the average age of a mother at her first birth is 26 years old (s.d. = 3.7).
- 5.
The relevant software is available from the following URLs: http://kb.iu.edu/data/avll.html & http://www.lrz.de/~sobecker/pscore.html. Accessed 12 April 2012.
- 6.
It is important to note that the test of the balancing property is only conducted on observations whose propensity scores belong to the intersection of the supports of the propensity score for the treated and controls. Once the propensity score space has been divided into a number of intervals that ensure that the average propensity score of the treated unit and control units in each interval do not differ, within each interval a test of the null hypothesis that the means of each characteristic do not differ for the treated and control units is conducted. This is the balancing test. If for one or more characteristics, the means differ, then the balancing property is not satisfied, and a less parsimonious specification is adopted (see Becker and Ichino 2002; Caliendo and Kopeinig 2008; Chen and Zeiser 2008).
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Acknowledgements
Both authors wish to thank Toshiaki Tachibanaki and Aki Tsuchiya for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and participants of the International Conference—Comparative Study on Happiness for their helpful comments and suggestions. They also acknowledge the kind permission of the National Family Committee of the Japanese Society of Family Sociology and the Social Science and the Social Science Japan Data Archive, Information Center for Social Science Research on Japan, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo in making available the data in the “National Family Research of Japan (NFRJ)” (Kazoku ni tsuite no Zenkoku Chousa) for use in the analysis in this chapter. The first author would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant in Aid for Scientific Research (B) No. 24330093 for a project on “Retirement Behavior of the Aged and their Cognitive Ability and Health” and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant in Aid for Scientific Research (B) No. 23330094 for a project “Life Events and Economic Behaviour: A Perspective of Family Inter-dependence” (Project Leader: Midori Wakabayashi). The second author wishes to acknowledge the financial support of a Japan Society for the Promotion of Society’s Topic-Setting Program to Advance Cutting-Edge Humanities and Social Sciences Research grant for a project entitled “Multi-Dimensional Dynamic Analysis of Gender Equality and the Role of the Family in Internationally Comparable Data” (Project Leader: Yoshio Higuchi).
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Sakata, K., McKenzie, C.R. (2016). Why Do Japanese Parents and Their Young Adult Children Live Together?. In: Tachibanaki, T. (eds) Advances in Happiness Research. Creative Economy. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55753-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55753-1_12
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