Aprica Childcare Institute proposes a Child-Caring Design.

Child-Caring Design” (CCD) is to design with “care” for children.
Here the term “care” means “to be concerned for,” “to pay attention to,” “to worry about” and “to warmly care for” children.
In today’s society, when we design objects and matters related to children, sadly we quite often do not give sufficient consideration to children.
Moreover, most things in society are created to suit the convenience of adults and by the hands of male adults. Such creations are not only construction such as buildings and matters such as urban planning but also affairs such as law and regulations. For example, recently, there was case concerning a woman who gave birth to a baby within 300 days of obtaining a divorce from her ex-husband and the law automatically decided the ex-husband as the biological father of the baby. This law gives no consideration to either the mother or the child. If you look at the situation from a different point of view, anything that is associated with children, whether it might be hardware such as buildings or software such as law and systems, should be made with CCD, paying full attention to children.
Quite some time ago in Seattle of the United States in the early 1970s, my friend, Dr. R. Aldrich who was a Professor of Pediatrics in a university there, one day took a group of children to the city, and to look around as if they were members of the government. He then invited them to hold a session for discussion and then initiated a campaign to make Seattle a better city for children to live in. It was the “Kid City” project. One of the improvements that resulted from the project was cleaner streets. It can be said that this is a special example of a CCD approach. Looking back, it is an overwhelming fact that CCD was already carried out in such a way as early as 40 years ago. I too hosted an international conference titled, “City and Children” in Tokyo alongside the board meeting, when I was the president of the International Pediatric Association. The year was 1981.
Naturally, the modalities of child-raising, childcare, and education for children as part of the human act of nurturing children are the most important matters which need CCD. This includes systems, construction, how to take care of children and how to educate them.

First, I’d like to consider the essentiality of CCD, for the sake of applying CCD to child-raising, childcare, and education. However, it is still very challenging so let us begin with the basics. “Human beings” are “biological beings” but at the same time they are also “social beings” as “people.” Therefore, in order for a child who was born as a “biological being” to grow into a “person,” we all know that he or she must be raised as a “social being” at home and school as well as in society. This human act of “raising” children – child-raising, childcare, and education – can be considered as the skills of humans who possess both biological and social facets. Of those, child-raising is a home-based skill as it takes place at home, while childcare (day care) and education are society-based skills as they take place in society. So, in order to improve all of them, a good pillar is required and that should naturally be “Child Bioemotinemics.” Without it child-raising, childcare, and education will not be enjoyable for children.
However, if we look at current circumstances that surround children in Japan, a diverse range of issues are arising at a variety of situations both at home and school, as well as in society.
At the very root of such child-related issues lies the rapid advancement of the civilization of cultures by science and technology, which has developed together since the beginning of the 20th century in the developed world. This also applies to Japan, and has created significant discrepancies between the modalities of child-raising, childcare, and education and the lifestyle in the prosperous society. Right now, we need to redefine child-raising, childcare, and education from the intrinsic understanding of the nature of “human beings” and “people.”
The human acts of “raising children” seem to overlap with each other when they are considered as socio-technology for nurturing children as social beings and are divided into three categories of ikuji (child-raising), hoiku (childcare) and kyooiku (education) in accordance with children’s ages. The important point to note is that all have the component “iku” which indicates many underlying concepts in common. “Iku” means to “nurture” so I would like to define the above three acts of raising children based on my personal view.

Child-raising refers to an act of nurturing children until they become fully matured as adult social beings. It is provided by parents to their offspring or relatives equivalent to parents to children in their own homes or the equivalent. However, generally, it refers to the skills centered on caring for and playing with infants who have immature verbal and motor functions in their daily lives, beginning immediately after the birth of a child. The word “iku” of “ikuji” (child-raising) means to “raise” and “ikuji”, as a complete term refers to “childcare” in English. The next term, which I am going to define after ikuji, is “hoiku.” It can be translated as “nursery” in English but in the United States, a for-profit nursery is also called “childcare” making “ikuji” and “hoiku” indistinguishable. For the past ten years, the word “parenting” has become widely used but this word covers broader acts of parents and as you might have guessed, “ikuji” is part of parenting. Parenting should be regarded as the word that can be applied to every aspect of giving parental care to someone, including childcare.
When we hear the word “childcare” many people think of it as the role of mothers but in today’s day and age, such typical division of labor may not stand firm any longer. The story of the female astronaut, who is also a mother, going into space recently says it all. Surely in the ancient days when our ancestors lived by hunting and collecting food then by farming, it was the perfect arrangement for men to work outside while women stayed behind to keep home and bring up children for the sake of procreation. However, in the 18th and 19th century, there was rapid advancement in science and technology and thanks to that advancement, we gained material wealth in the 20th and 21st centuries. In modern times, the capabilities of a male and a female became equal with only a few exceptions and unless each individual puts efforts into sustaining this rich society through the use of one’s abilities and unless males and females cooperatively share the chores of childcare and housework, a peaceful home environment would begin to deteriorate. Therefore, we are at a turning point in history where we obviously need to consider male paterescence, a phase in life for a male to become a father after getting married and having children, more than female materescence, a phase in life for a female to become a mother after marriage and conception.
In the old days where the majority of people accepted the idea that children should be raised by their own parents, more precisely by their mothers, and childcare was provided to children whose mothers were incapable of taking care of their children at home and who lacked childcare by assembling them in a facility (day care center). Necessary care was provided by nursery teachers on behalf of the mothers. However, modern society allowed significant advancement in the area of social inclusion of females and in such a society childcare should be regarded as a socio-technical system which supplements child-raising. Under the old concept, the children of female doctors working to counteract today’s shortage of physicians can be categorized as children who lack childcare at home. I believe this should not happen and childcare should be positioned as a positive part of child-raising.
Therefore, the present-day childcare refers to experts such as nursery teachers teaching and nurturing young children, mainly infants and toddlers, through looking after infants and toddlers, including playing, at social facilities like nurseries for a limited period of time, in order to support childcare given by parents. For toddlers, of course, childcare should contain educational significance including disciplining. The proportion of the educational aspect is not small: it should be viewed as part of education prior to elementary school and coordination with school education is important.
Childcare has become a normal practice for working mothers. There are some data from the United States that childcare will not cause problems in the physical growth and/or mental development of children provided that the capabilities of nursery teachers are good and the duration of mother-child separation is not too long. The issue of the length of childcare is also the issue for the corporations that employ female staff. I believe that in order to improve childcare as a social system, not only the corporate awareness but also the arrangement of laws for corporations must be reviewed. There are plenty of cases also in Japan where a child raised by an adopted mother as a result of the loss of his or her biological mother growing up to be a fine adult and contributing to society. A few years ago, there was someone born under such unfortunate circumstance who was awarded a Nobel Prize.

Education is for educational experts to teach and nurture children of above certain age with sufficiently developed verbal and motor functions at facilities such as schools. Children are taught about the knowledge and technologies in life in accordance to the children’s ages. Kindergartens are pre-school educational institutes but currently the unification of kindergartens and day care centers is taking place from the standpoint of the importance of the educational aspect in childcare. However, this unification did not proceed as smoothly as everyone hoped for and it appears to be almost a battle between childcare absorbing early childhood education and turning it into broader preschool education, and early childhood education by swallowing childcare and turning it into part of education. Personally, I think we should begin by unifying the theories of education and childcare. Perhaps it is more convenient from various aspects to turn childcare into education – by calling the part of education consisting largely of “caring” for children’s daily lives “childcare,” and calling education with reduced proportion of “caring” with “early childhood education.” On that basis, we should create facilities of various styles and purposes according to the local characteristics and make them readily available for families. Daily routines of families raising children are not uniform but diverse and society needs to be able to accommodate such diversity. To achieve this, modalities of day care centers and kindergartens also need to be diversified.
Now, let’s take a look at child-raising, childcare, and education from the standpoint of “Child Bioemotinemics.” Child-raising and childcare during infancy before verbal development must be provided to children mainly with “gentleness.” As infants have not yet developed good verbal skills, every action from not only touching and making physical contact but also “piggybacking,” “holding” and lifting him/her up in the air are affected. Although infants have little verbal understanding, speaking to them in a gentle tone during these actions and plays is important. This not only stimulates verbal programming in infants but also increases the activities of various programs in infants, particularly the physical programs that are inherited from their parents.
In order to link mental and physical programs, which children are born with, it is important to make linkages while the programs are exerted. In order to activate such programs, it is essential to have gentle human interactions of course, but equally important is the pleasant, positive, informative environment such as the brightness of buildings and play fields, as well as animals, flowers and trees. Without such environments, we cannot make progress on either the concentration of basic mental programs, which are dispersed in the brain, or the development of association areas and the centralization through which the programs are brought under the control of the frontal lobe.
Education after sufficient verbal development, including the educational aspects of day care centers and kindergartens, is the means of improving already completed programs via verbal “rational information.” However, considering the fact that this kind of education is conducted by activating programs through the “exchange of words,” it is obvious that the role of program-activating “emotional information” in the exchanging of words is also important.

Therefore, for children in the environment of child-raising, childcare, and education, it is vital to allow them to spend days experiencing, in accordance with age, “joy of playing,” “pleasure of learning” and “delight of living” to the fullest. During babyhood, “playing” and “learning” are synonymous but the two are gradually separated as the children grow older and start school. However, the ways of “learning while playing” and “playing while learning” should be designed with CCD.
Clearly, the author accepts the acts of disciplining and scolding during childcare, in addition to gentleness. Obviously, such acts must never lead to violence and must be refrained from until children develop sufficient skills of verbal communication. In order to become social beings, they must understand what is good and what is bad so it is significantly important to teach children the standards for good and bad.
What is required here is the love and loving eyes of an adult as a parent, a nursery teacher or a school teacher toward the children who need to be disciplined or scolded. Without that loving look in one’s eyes, disciplining will not be effective. We should also consider the importance of interactions among children themselves. Furthermore, please do not forget the fact that children do not grow up only in the child-parent relationship or child-childcare/education expert relationship.

This section may have turned out to be a bit abrupt, but I would also like to mention that for the modalities of child-raising, childcare, and education, particularly for young children, female perspectives are of considerable importance. Females have a built-up wealth of experience: over the long history of humankind, females, in their life stages, go through pregnancy, childbirth and childcare, taking care of many aspects in children’s lives until they become fully matured. In addition to that unique female experience, the fact that females bear biological duty of handing life down to the next generation is also important. As Ms. Raphael pointed out, females have fulfilled their social and biological duties by gathering wisdom in the history of humans and by helping each other in their own cultures. If you consider these facts, I think the ideas, which spring up from them, are valuable. Here in Japan, if you look at the childcare campaigns that are organized as activities of NPOs and volunteers in many regions, I truly admire female perspectives. Therefore I would like females to actively participate in achieving CCD in child-raising, childcare, and education, by voicing their opinions. I have no doubt that their participation will provide great strength in various social fields. When we consider current childcare circumstances in Japan, particularly considering them in association with the 3.11 Great East Japan earthquake and nuclear meltdown, we are at the turning point where we need to carry out interdisciplinary and comprehensive study from children’s perspectives with “Child science” as a main pillar and reconsider CCD in child-raising, childcare, and education. I believe, “Child Bioemotinemics” can become a core for such a mission. I do not think I covered the topic fully but now I will lay down my pen in a hope that this paper will contribute to CCD in some way.

Corporate bodies interested in learning more about CCD, please contact:
info@aprica-childcare-institute.com