Survey by Doshisha University Reveals Child-Raising Concerns (Behavior, Education, Personality, and Development): Changes According to the Age of the Child

Associate Professor Masaharu Kato of the Doshisha University Center for Baby Science, and a group from the Live Database Research Group of the Japanese Society of Baby Science, conducted a survey on the concerns and worries of parents with children up to the age of 12 and announced that parents' worries tend to vary according to their children's ages. Analysis of online questionnaire results from 582 parents with children aged 0−12. It was shown that parents' interest in children's language education is high until around the time they start elementary school, after which it gradually declines. It is hoped that the findings will provide objective guidelines for child-raising. The results were published in the October 13 issue of the international journal Frontiers in Psychology.

The basic approach in research on developmental science is direct participation by infants and parents in experiments in laboratories, etc.; however, the recruitment of necessary participants is predicted to become difficult in the future due to declining birth rates worldwide. Japan's total fertility rate in 2020 was 1.34, falling sharply below 2.1; this is an indicator of population decline, but the birth rates of many other developed countries have declined in the same way. If it is not possible to secure the number of people necessary for research, it will also be difficult to ensure research reproducibility.

As a result of this, the research group is currently aiming to build an online platform for parents and children to participate in developmental research. With the aim of launching the service within the current fiscal year, the plan is to provide participants with information about child-raising, based on scientific evidence. By offering it online, the expectation is to promote study participation in remote areas as well.

In order to build a platform that enables parents and children to participate in these studies for long periods of time, the research group designed a questionnaire with multiple-choice questions that ask parents about their parenting concerns. Specifically, they hired Cross Marketing to get responses from 582 parents with children aged 0-12 (63% women and 37% men). The questionnaire asked them to choose from the following four options: 1. what they want to know about behavior; 2. what they hesitate to ask, or want to know, about education and learning; 3. what they want to know, or their concerns, about temperament and personality; and 4. what they are interested in regarding development.

Analyzing the results by age, indicated the following:

1. For behavior, the options "sleep" and "breastfeeding/weaning" were chosen more at younger ages, while options such as food preferences were chosen more at older ages.

2. For education, it was found that while interest in sports-related extracurricular activities (selection rate) continues to be high from an early age, interest in cram school and other study-related extracurricular activities sharply rose around the time school started, with this interest being the highest among parents with children aged 10-13.

3. For temperament and personality, two items, introversion and restlessness, gradually increased with age, while the items "intense reluctance" and "wildness" decreased after peaking at 2-4 years. If we look at 1-3, parents are inclined to know certain things and have particular concerns with regard to their children's development, demonstrating that certain changes were occurring. These results have the potential to alleviate parenting concerns.

4. In regards to the final point, 16 options were prepared, based primarily on items established as a research field of developmental science, with "mental development," "brain development," and "body development" garnering more interest than other options. However, the frequency of the other options did not differ considerably. Hence, there were no prominent items. Although parents have a general interest in development, this suggested that their awareness about concrete research fields might be inadequate. These results may indicate a mismatch of interests between researchers and participants to date.

By having researchers provide participants with easy-to-understand explanations, it is expected that research reproducibility can be ensured by maintaining the number of participants, and facilitating educational applications. Associate Professor Kato commented, "We are thinking of creating an online live database, as a system to successfully connect the concerns of participants with what researchers want to know. We can also share these concerns among researchers by having participants conduct inspections and questionnaire surveys online. By creating a forum, we would like to create a system where participants communicate their concerns and experts provide advice based on scientific insights."