I Want to Get Away from Raising My Junior High School-Age Children

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:59 JST, September 7, 2025

Dear Troubleshooter:

I’m a male employee in my 40s. I have two children in junior high school. When they were little, I had fun raising them, even though it was hard at times. Recently, however, I’ve started to feel more strongly that I want to get away from the world of childrearing as soon as possible.

On the financial side, the costs associated with giving them an education have been steadily increasing, and the money that I can spend on myself has been decreasing. Similarly, I have to limit the amount of time that I can use the way I want in order to make sure there’s enough time for us to spend together as a family.

Although I love my kids, I no longer have that feeling of wanting to take the initiative to be involved in things like their entrance exams and the future courses of their lives. Whenever they fight with each other or clash with my wife, I get this strong impulse to just throw everything away or escape.

If I could redo my life from the beginning, I would probably choose a life in which I didn’t have kids. I’ve also started to sense something different in my wife, who deals with the kids while sometimes voicing her own complaints.

What attitude should I have going forward while raising my kids?

Z, Hyogo Prefecture

Dear Mr. Z:

It’s easy to feel the joy of raising children when they are little, but when they reach junior high school, they tend to talk back. That’s when the purity of their younger years tends to be overshadowed.

Kids going through puberty resist their parents and try to become mentally independent from them. The flip side of aiming at self-reliance is that they can’t depend on their parents even if they want to. It’s a special, unbalanced period of life during which they swing between self-reliance and dependence.

A parent’s role, the things they have to respond to and the things that arise while raising children — the kinds of things you’re experiencing — change as the child grows. In addition, many parents with children in junior and senior high school enter a period in their lives where they also undergo changes, regardless of their gender, and a sizable number of them complain of physical and mental health issues.

I recommend that you and your wife make an opportunity for each of you to talk about your feelings and frustrations. Differences have surely emerged in the positions and roles between mom, who spends more time interacting with the kids on a daily basis, and dad, who spends less time with them than when they were little. You’d probably feel better if you and your wife could understand each other better.

Your income is the foundation of your family’s day-to-day lives, and that will continue to be true until your children become financially independent. That said, don’t push yourself too hard with regard to what you’re feeling. It might help if you visit a medical facility or seek counseling.

Sooner or later, a time is going to come when you’ll be able to pay more attention to making your own life feel more fulfilling. Hold on to that hope.

Naoki Ogi, education commentator