  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 school-aged
children. Using the fixed effects model, we found that school closures lead to
students 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.
