Takae Moriyama: Realizing a True "Children-Centered Society"

2023/04/17

All systems in Japan treat minors as immature, focusing support primarily through their guardians. On the other hand, many of the children we support come from situations where parents lack the capacity to care for them due to abuse, poverty, single-parent households, or being young carers. In other cases, parents find it difficult to fully understand the hardships their children face due to being sexual minorities, having developmental disabilities, or being foreign nationals. The reason "abuse survivors" in particular longed for a "Children's Agency" was the concept of separating children from their families—protecting children's human rights as a whole society, regardless of the family situation. However, in the end, it became the "Children and Families Agency," a name that sounds pleasant to adults and closer to the "good old days" (though "good" is ironic as it includes outdated elements). While the philosophy of "Children-Centered" promoted by the Children and Families Agency is easy to say, in a Japanese society where it was difficult even to name it the "Children's Agency" instead of the "Children and Families Agency," I believe there are still major hurdles to its realization.

For children, especially those in elementary school and above, the center of life is the home and, even more so, school life. The vision was to stop treating children's issues in silos and instead coordinate them. However, the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) was ultimately not included in the Children and Families Agency; instead, the child welfare division of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) was primarily transferred to it. This has merely shifted the silo from MHLW and MEXT to the Children and Families Agency and MEXT, failing to reach a fundamental solution. They say they will coordinate closely, but if that were possible, it should have been possible during the MHLW era as well.

Since 2009, we have been providing learning support for children who have experienced abuse. Many children are deprived of a normal environment from early childhood due to abuse and enter school life without the accumulated experiences of having picture books read to them, going to the zoo, or learning words and numbers in daily life. Meanwhile, children from wealthy families start school having already mastered 1st or 2nd-grade levels by taking English lessons or attending early childhood classrooms from a young age.

Is it the Children and Families Agency that will bridge this gap? Or MEXT? When we started our activities, we were told that "public education budgets are strictly for school education, and we cannot strengthen educational support targeting only specific children, so it is more of a welfare budget." As a result, children end up receiving learning support after school while attending school, effectively having to study twice for the convenience of adults.

Is it desirable to provide support only in a way that takes away after-school playtime and rest time? In a distorted society where Juku and extracurricular lessons have become the norm, this might not feel out of place, but just like the right to learn, playing and resting during childhood are important. Originally, instead of imposing a burden on children, we should be discussing how to guarantee the right to learn, the right to play, and the right to rest for all children, regardless of whether it concerns education or welfare.

As long as the Children and Families Agency and MEXT remain divided, issues such as the educational gap, bullying, school refusal, and the high rate of child suicide in April and September (the start of new school terms) will be left behind. These are problems where the boundary of responsibility between education and welfare is blurred, leading to finger-pointing or the persistence of similar systems in both departments that impose a burden on the users.

  While the silos remain, it is hard to say how much the budget will actually increase. The FY2020 budget for the MHLW Children and Families Bureau was approximately 500 billion yen (https://www.mhlw.go.jp/wp/yosan/yosan/20syokan/dl/gaiyo-08.pdf), and the budget draft related to the Cabinet Office's New System for Child and Child-rearing Support was approximately 3.2 trillion yen (https://www8.cao.go.jp/shoushi/budget/pdf/budget/r02_yosangaiyou.pdf). Before the Children and Families Agency began, the child-related budget outside of MEXT's jurisdiction was nearly 4 trillion yen.  

In contrast, the budget for the Children and Families Agency starting in FY2023 is 4.8 trillion yen. While detailed analysis is necessary because some MEXT operations are moving to the Children and Families Agency, the impression is that the budget has not changed significantly. Meanwhile, the total budget for pensions, medical care, and nursing care, which account for the majority of Japan's social security costs, is nearly 30 trillion yen—a six-fold difference compared to the Children and Families Agency's budget. I am not saying that the elderly welfare budget should be cut, but I think these figures show how much child-related matters are still borne by individual families rather than society. Furthermore, while there is a trend toward accepting children's rights and diversity, most households are now dual-income, and I do not believe families have the stamina to remain the sole providers of that support.

In the past, the "Children and Families Bureau" was established within the MHLW, and the "Headquarters for Promotion of Development and Support for Children and Young People" was established within the Cabinet Office. However, it is a familiar sight to see these initiatives fail to change significantly due to the negative effects of silos, eventually landing as just one more silo as social interest fades. Regarding the current Children and Families Agency, which started without even being able to follow its original concept in its name, I feel that society as a whole must watch over it and take action to ensure it does not end up the same way.