Many prior studies suggest that parents, particularly mothers, sacrifice their own living standards to protect their children from suffering deprivation (Cantillon et al., 2016; Dunbar et al., 2013; Main & Bradshaw, 2016). This can result in an inaccurate estimation of child poverty. However, empirical evidence that the mothers engage in these ‘protecting’ behaviours is limited, mainly due to the difficulty of measuring the living standards of children and mothers individually. This study, using the Children’s Possessions and Activities Survey (n = 1,071) which is a mother-child paired data of individual deprivations in Japan, improves the comparability of mother’s deprivation against child’s deprivation, and use both child- and mother-reported data for child deprivation to examine mother-child deprivation. The results reveal that child-reported child deprivation is more prevalent than mother-reported child deprivation, and that mothers protect their children, i.e., provide items for children while they themselves go without, only when they believe that the item is necessary and not necessarily when their children believe that it is necessary. Further analysis showed that substantial portion of low-income mothers engage in ‘protecting’ behaviour, yet, it was also shown that mothers’ ‘exposing (i.e. not providing items for children, while they themselves have them) also increased as income decreased. Finally, examining the relationship between children’s life satisfaction and mother-child deprivation combinations showed that there was no evidence that life satisfaction of ‘protected’ children differ from that of congruous non-deprived (neither mother nor child deprived) children.
