子供が爆食いしたウインナーおにぎり朝ごはん

Why do Japanese parents say they want to “strike”?

Fed up with her kids rejecting dinner after dinner, this parent jokes that she wants to ストライキを起こす — “go on strike” — against her own children’s food complaints. ストライキ is a straight loanword from English “strike,” normally reserved for labor unions and workplace walkouts, but Japanese speakers happily borrow its weight for any one-person protest, from a toddler’s dinner boycott to an exhausted parent threatening to stop cooking entirely.

The word entered Japanese during the early 20th-century labor movement and is often shortened to スト (e.g. スト決行, “strike carried out,” in news headlines). 育児ストライキ (“parenting strike”) is a well-worn, self-deprecating phrase among Japanese parents online, describing the fantasy of simply refusing to keep making everyone’s favorite meals. The joke lands because it borrows the seriousness of an organized labor action to describe losing a nightly battle with kids over onions — resolved here, fittingly, by surrendering to sausage rice balls instead.