RetireJapan

Hello,

I'm looking for advice about what I need to do regarding nursery school, in Japan, when one partner is on maternity leave and our first child is going to nursery school. How does this effect how long our first child can stay at nursery school or how much we have to pay?

Thank you.

Did you talk to your ward or city office?

We are expecting right now. And as preparation, we went to discuss child-care services at our ward office. They were quite helpful and explained in much detail.

My daughter has nursery/kindergarted for her kids, but it seems conditional on her working. In principle if she is not working she is supposed to keep the kids at home? Not sure of the details, but it is not great.

But there are exceptions to this. It may depend on the age of the older child. My granddaughter was 3 and she was able to continue on in hoikuen while my daughter was on child-care leave.

Nancy wrote: ↑Wed Feb 21, 2024 8:20 am But there are exceptions to this. It may depend on the age of the older child. My granddaughter was 3 and she was able to continue on in hoikuen while my daughter was on child-care leave.

And it may depend on, if by 'daycare', is that referring to 保育園/hoikuen, or 幼稚園/kindergarten.

We went through this recently. The plan was for our eldest to go to 保育園 and the baby to stay home with mum on maternity leave. We were told very clearly that people who are working get priority so either both kids go and mum goes back to work or neither kid goes.

We decided to send them both and mum go back to work earlier than planned.

Private daycare is different though I think.

My information may be outdated, as it has been a number of years, but the basics should be the same.

Our then 3 year old, was accepted into the (public) day care/hoikuen, shortly before I started my one year maternity leave for child number 2. The only rule was to pick him up daily around 16:45. After I started to work again - and luckily could enroll child number 2 there too - that changed to 18:30 (or later against an additional fee).

Regarding payment, the hoikuen go by:
a) income
b) age of child (the younger the more expensive)
c) number of siblings at hoikuen.

a) does not apply to private (muninka/無認可) facilities, only to public ones (in our case run by the city) and possible also applies to nintei/認定, ninka/認可 hoikuen - those that are often? private, but are authorized by the government and are thereby eligible for subsidies).

Hope this helps a bit.

Thanks for the replies all.