Impact of closing schools on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence using panel data from Japan

The spread of the novel coronavirus disease caused schools in Japan to close to cope with the pandemic. In response to this, parents of students were obliged to care for their children during the daytime when they were usually at school. Does the increase in burden of childcare influence parents’ mental health? Based on short panel data from mid-March to mid-April 2020, we explored how school closures influenced the mental health of parents with schoolaged children. Using the fixed effects model, we found that school closures lead to student’s mothers suffering from worse mental health than other females, while the fathers’ mental health did not differ from other males. This tendency was only observed for less educated mothers who had children attending primary school, but not those attending junior high school. The contribution of this paper is to show that school closures increased the inequality of mental health between genders and the educational background of parents.

💡 Research Summary

This paper investigates how the nationwide school closures in Japan during the early stage of the COVID‑19 pandemic affected the mental health of parents with school‑aged children. Using a short panel dataset collected through five waves of online surveys conducted between mid‑March and mid‑April 2020, the authors apply individual fixed‑effects regression models to control for time‑invariant personal characteristics and to isolate the impact of school closures from other contemporaneous shocks (e.g., daily infection counts, the state of emergency declaration). The key explanatory variables are school‑closure status, parent gender, child’s school level (primary versus junior high), and parental education level, with interaction terms allowing for heterogeneous effects.

The main findings are strikingly gender‑ and education‑specific. Mothers of primary‑school children who have lower educational attainment experience a statistically significant deterioration in mental health during school closures, with an estimated decline of roughly 0.45 standard deviations in a standardized mental‑health index (such as the K‑6). In contrast, fathers show no measurable change, and mothers with higher education do not exhibit a significant effect. Moreover, the adverse impact is absent for parents of junior‑high‑school children, regardless of gender or education. These results suggest that the additional childcare burden imposed by school closures disproportionately falls on less‑educated mothers of younger children, amplifying existing gender and socioeconomic mental‑health inequalities.

Robustness checks reinforce the credibility of the results. The authors re‑estimate the models including wave‑specific dummy variables, region‑by‑time fixed effects, and controls for occupation and household income, finding that the core estimates remain stable. Nevertheless, the study acknowledges several limitations: the sample consists of self‑selected internet respondents, which may limit external validity; mental health is measured with a single self‑report scale; and the observation window is relatively short, precluding analysis of longer‑term mental‑health trajectories.

Policy implications are clear. During abrupt school closures, targeted support for childcare—especially aimed at low‑educated mothers of primary‑school children—could mitigate the mental‑health fallout. Provision of temporary childcare services, flexible remote‑work arrangements, and rapid access to mental‑health counseling are recommended to curb the widening of gender and education‑based health disparities. The paper also calls for future research using longer panel data and richer mental‑health metrics to better understand the persistence of these effects and to inform more resilient pandemic‑response strategies.