Japanese Longitudinal Study of Early Childhood Development and Parenting（Joint research with Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute (BERD)）

The Center for Early Childhood Development, Education, and Policy Research (Cedep) attached to the Graduate School of Education at the University of Tokyo and Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute (BERD) have worked together on the project to study children's everyday life and development longitudinally. This project is to elucidate how children’s life and caregivers’ parenting change as children grow by surveying the various aspects of them over multiple years. We aim to consider better involvement with children and how support for parenting should be based on the survey results.

In this project, we continue to conduct yearly surveys on caregivers who have children born in AY2016 (monitors). We can find out the “present” aspects of children’s everyday life and development. This project enables us to identify the “process” and “causality” of the growth and development of parents and children, such as how children grow and develop every year, and how caregivers’ involvement and attitudes change or affect children’s development. We distributed questionnaires to households and requested two caregivers for each household (mainly mother and father) to fill in the questionnaire. Thus, we can examine similarities and differences in parenting behaviors or awareness for children between mothers and fathers.