One Child or One Career: Choice for Working Mothers in Japan

We had our first child 1.5 year ago in Japan, and she started nursery about a year ago. Now that we are expecting our second kid, it is becoming painfully clear how hard the Japanese system is for working mothers who want to have more than one child. This was especially surprising for me, since the declining birthrate has been a major issue for Japan for decades, and all levels of government is trying to solve it, but still the end result is a system that pushes mothers to choose between career or multiple kids.

Finding nursery in Japan

We went through finding a nursery for our then 8 months old daughter last year, but I haven’t wrote about it yet, so here it goes.

Family Finance Meeting

People with (good) financial advisors often have family meetings, where they discuss financial matters (income, spending, investments) with their immediate family (spouse, kids). This can be useful for people without financial advisors too, so we decided to start doing it. In this post I’ll describe why and how we are going about it.

Long flight with a 6 months old baby

We just took a 14.5 hours flight with our 6 months old baby from Japan to Europe and in this post I’ll share how we manged to make it a pleasant experience for everyone involved.

How to use the corporate babysitter vouchers (ベビーシッター派遣事業割引券)?

All levels of the Japanese government have various programs to support people with kids. One of this, ベビーシッター派遣事業割引券, is a national program subsidizing baby sitters for working parents: companies can purchase baby sitter tickets and give it to their employees. My company is participating in this, and since it is a bit complicated to use, I’ll describe how to use it in this post.

Newborn baby paperwork in Tokyo

We recently had a baby in Tokyo, and in this post I’ll share our experience with the required paperwork (mostly in chronological order).

Our situation for reference:

• my wife is Japanese, thus our baby is also Japanese, so the baby doesn’t need residence card and visa
• we live in Tokyo, and some of these programs are provided by the Tokyo prefecture (but other prefecture might have similar programs)
• I work for a Japanese company as a fulltime employee (会社員), and they provides my health insurance

Tech that helped us during the first months with a newborn baby

I work in tech, and while I try to maintain a healthy work-life balance, I still use many gadgets, so I thought to share which tech solutions helped us during the first month with our newborn baby.

Why I decided to speak my language, Hungarian to our kids and raise them multilingual

We are expecting our first child very soon, so we have been thinking and discussing which language we want to speak to them. In this post I’ll go through some of the things we considered and how we arrived to a conclusion.