Only 28.2% of households with one child say they want a second, down 5.1 points from a year earlier and the lowest figure since the survey began in 2018, Meiji Yasuda said on October 19.
The most common reason given was anxiety about future income, cited by 54.5% of respondents. The survey has tracked the question since 2018, and the latest result is the weakest yet.
A question of more than money
Mayu Yamaguchi, a specially appointed professor at Shinshu University, argues that economics alone does not explain the hesitation. In a contribution carried by Yahoo! News Japan, she points to "intensive parenting" — a style in which a parent pours time, effort and money into a single child — as a force pushing families toward having only one.
The style took hold in the United States in the 1990s, she writes, as manufacturing gave way to the information industry and steady career paths broke down. Parents signed children up for lessons, sat in on all of them and praised every effort, on the idea that early childhood is the foundation of a life.
Japan, where lifetime employment is eroding, has followed. Yamaguchi describes parents logging reading sessions in an app against an unrealistic goal of 10,000 picture books by age 3, and taking babies barely able to hold up their heads to swimming lessons. The old norm of children playing outside unsupervised has given way to constant parental monitoring.
One child, all the expectation
When expectations that were once spread across several children land on one, parents compete with those around them to make sure that child is not a failure, she writes. Little capacity is left to give a second child the same energy, and fewer children concentrate expectations further, raising the intensity of parenting again.
The shift has changed what a sibling means, in her account. The brother or sister who was once a playmate under loose parental supervision is becoming a rival for a parent's attention, and a younger sibling who demands to be held during an older child's activities can take on the quality of an intruder.
Yamaguchi writes that this is the real reason single-child households keep growing. She also notes that the pressure of such high-density parenting has drawn criticism in the United States, where parents are urged to be a "lighthouse" that lights the darkness only when needed rather than a helicopter hovering overhead.
Leaving that lighthouse role to parents alone has limits, she argues. A society in which a child who fails can try again would lift the pressure on parents and give them reason to hope for a second child.