The spread of the novel coronavirus disease caused schools in Japan to close to cope with the pandemic. In response to the school closures, parents of students were obliged to care for their children during the daytime, when children usually were at school. Did the increase in the burden of childcare influence parents’ mental health? Based on short panel data from mid-March to mid-April 2020, we explore how school closures influenced the mental health of parents with school-aged children. Using a fixed-effects model, we find that school closures led to mothers of students suffering from worse mental health compared to other females, while the fathers’ mental health did not differ from that of other males. This tendency is only observed for less-educated mothers who had children attending primary school, not for those with children attending junior high school nor for more-educated mothers. The contribution of this paper is showing that school closures increased the inequality of mental health between genders and parents with different educational backgrounds.

新型冠状病毒病的传播导致日本的学校关闭以应对大流行。为应对学校停课，学生家长不得不在白天照看孩子，而白天孩子们通常都在上学。育儿负担的增加是否影响了父母的心理健康？根据 2020 年 3 月中旬至 4 月中旬的简短面板数据，我们探讨了学校停课如何影响有学龄儿童的父母的心理健康。使用固定效应模型，我们发现学校停课导致学生的母亲与其他女性相比心理健康状况更差，而父亲的心理健康与其他男性没有差异。这种趋势只在有孩子上小学的受教育程度较低的母亲身上观察到，不适合那些有孩子上初中的人，也不适合受过高等教育的母亲。本文的贡献在于表明，学校停课增加了性别和不同教育背景的父母之间的心理健康不平等。