2-2 Family Life and Part-Time Job

[On the average, how often do you have dinner with your parents each week?]

　

It is often pointed out that Japanese fathers spend less time with their family primarily owing to the fact that they devote more hours in their office and also the longer commuting time compared to the international standard, particularly with European countries and the US. However, our data this time betrayed our assumptions. Since college students are presumably acknowledged to lead an independent life,we focused only on high school students by asking how often they eat dinner with their whole family as an indicator of the family bond.
Approximately half of the Japanese high school students have dinner with their parents everynight. On the other hand, most American high school students eat dinner with their parents roughly 2 - 5 times a week. The reasons behind this difference might be attributed to the ever increasing number of working mothers and the rising divorce rate in the US.
Given that S private school is located away from downtown, one could assume that the students spend more time in commuting. Being a private girls' school, the strict code their school tries to enforce might reflect in the data that close to 40% of the students have dinner with their parents every night.
This tendency might also be true with the case of having a part-time job. In this private school, 94% of the students responded that they would not have a part-time job during the school year. Nevertheless, the pattern of engaging in part-time work is quite similar between American high school students overall and, in particular, the students of N public school in Japan, which one could presume has less strict school codes. When it comes to college, more than half of the students work twenty hours a week in the US, as compared to college students in Japan.

[How many hours per week do you work on your part-time job during the school year?]

	Japan	US
20 hours plus	29	163
15-20 hours	33	60
10-15 hours	47	30
5-10 hours)	37	12
less than 5 hours	21	14
no part-time job during the school year	378	138