Kindergarten-Family Collaboration Model (KFCM) to Support Raising Children

Kindergartens have been expected to take on a new role of child-raising support due to changes in the social environment such as declining birthrate and deregulation. A web page can be an important means for parents to gather information on the kindergarten efficiently and a web page can strongly influence the parents’ satisfaction of the kindergarten. The paper first clarifies what parents hoped for in kindergarten websites by the questionnaire survey. It then focuses on private use of the blog and blog syndication, and devised Kindergarten-Family Collaboration Model (KFCM) by which childcare workers and parents can efficiently share children’s information with each other, and finally, the paper describes the development and implementation of the system. Establishing a new mechanism which allows kindergartens and families to connect to each other enables seamless sharing of perceptions and information regarding children at kindergartens and families, thus easing the child-rearing anxiety of the parents. Consequently, the research showed that KFCM enabled effective collaboration between kindergartens and families and that the substitution of the conventionally-used correspondence notebook (used by a class teacher and parents to exchange messages) was possible by this system and that it improved parents’ satisfaction.