Child-rearing women in the 1960s inspired the media to produce the idiom kyōiku mama, which referred to "the domestic counterpart of sararii-man"[attribution needed] (salaryman).
This encompassed a major responsibility to "rear children, especially the males, to successfully pass the competitive tests needed to enter high school and college".
[attribution needed][5] No such idiom emerged that deemed men "education papas"; it was "mamas" who became a social phenomenon.[relevant?]
Social prejudices influence media stereotypes of kyōiku mamas that blame women rather than political conditions.
In one case, a restaurant owner paid a $95,000 bribe in an attempt to get his child enrolled in Aoyama Gakuin, a prestigious kindergarten for children who are three or four years old.
[6] The issue is compounded by the notion that most important job positions in business and government are held by graduates of the University of Tokyo.
Back then, ikuji (育児, "child-raising") included a larger surrounding environment, made up of more relatives and extended family, and more children: siblings and cousins.
Reliance on professionals has largely created a new generation of young mothers with low self-confidence in their child-raising abilities.
Another subtype, described by Nishioka Rice, is the kosodate mama (子育てママ), who adds psychosociological elements into child-raising.
Through skinship, ittaikan (一体感) is achieved, a "one-ness and balanced, positively valenced dependency"[attribution needed] between mother and child.
Daytime television, magazines, products, and services for mothers are largely focused on improving the home and raising the children.
A common description of a mother's free time is “three meals and a nap.”[4] Kyōiku mamas, preparatory preschools, and heavily academic curricula exist in Japan, yet they are relatively rare and concentrated in urban, wealthy areas.
"[This quote needs a citation] In the post-World War II era in Japan, the mother was the creator of a new child-centered world stamped with middle-class values.
A woman was expected to be a "good wife, wise mother" and became the single most important figure in raising the child to become a successful future adult.
Through self-cultivation and rearing of the children, the woman was crucial to a family's ability to claim a place in the so-called middle stratum.
An ethnographic study by Shimizu Tokuda (1991) portrayed one middle school that faced persistent academic problems in a working-class neighborhood of Osaka.
While students' enrollment in high school slightly improved, academic achievement level remained lower than the national average.
Both of Ronald Reagan's education secretaries focused attention on Japanese mothers as mirrors to improve American families and schools.
Reagan's first Secretary of Education, Terrel Bell (credited for the wording of A Nation at Risk) wrote an enthusiastic foreword to Guy Odom's Mothers, Leadership and Success—a book whose basic point was that only vigorous, aggressive and intelligent Super Moms exemplified by Japanese mothers could reinvigorate America.
William J. Bennett, head of the Department of Education in Reagan's second term, praised Japan's "one parent on the scene" who "stays in touch with the teachers, supervises the homework, arranges extra instructional help if needed, and buttresses the child's motivation to do well in school and beyond".
At the national university entrance exams, held in Tokyo, most mothers travel with their children to the examination hall.
They arrive and stay at a nearby hotel, grilling their children on last-minute statistics and making sure that they are not late to the exam.
Parental stress resulted in the commonality of new childhood problems; these include bronchial asthma, stammering, poor appetite, proneness to bone fractures, and school phobia.
These mothers are said to not do a lot of homemaking, commonly making large, freezable meals that are easy to reheat in case they are not home or too busy to do the cooking.
[18] The Japanese Ministry of Education published a white paper stating that children do not have opportunities such as "coming into contact with nature, feeling awe and respect for life, and experiencing the importance of hard work learning from difficulties".
[19] In 2001, the National Education Research Institute found that 33 percent of teachers and principals polled said that they had witnessed a complete breakdown of class "over a continuous period" due to defiant children "engaging in arbitrary activity".
[19] The use of the term mukatsuku, meaning "irritating and troublesome", has been rising in use among students as a description of the feelings they experience of being fed up with teachers, parents, and life.