  COVID-19 has led to school closures in Japan to cope with the pandemic. Under
the state of emergency, in addition to school closure, after-school care has
not been sufficiently supplied. We independently collected individual level
data through internet surveys to construct short panel data from mid-March to
mid-June 2020, which covered before and after the state of emergency. We
analyze how the presence of school-aged children influences their parents views
about working from home. After controlling for various factors using a fixed
effects model, we find that in cases where parents were workers, and the
children are (1) in primary school, parents are willing to promote working from
home. If children are (2) in junior high school, the parents view is hardly
affected. (3) Surprisingly, workers whose children are primary school pupils
are most likely to support promotion of working from home after schools reopen.
Due to school closure and a lack of after-school care, parents need to work
from home, and this experience motivated workers with small children to
continue doing so to improve work-life balance even after schools reopen.
