Attending a Japanese Daycare (Hoikuen)

While E is enrolled in an English-speaking preschool, M attends hoikuen, Japanese daycare. Hoikuen enroll children from just a few months old to five years old, though it depends on the particular daycare center. Ours accepts children aged 0-3. It would take an entire post to explain the various tiers and nuances of the Japanese hoikuen system. Basically, they can be wholly private, privately managed but authorized by the government, and publicly run by the government. 

Daycares are usually managed, authorized, or funded on the municipal government level. In Tokyo, municipalities, or Kus, are massive and function as independent cities. We live in Shibuya-Ku (Shibuya refers both to Shibuya-Ku, a municipality inside Tokyo, as well as Shibuya city, a neighborhood within Shibuya-Ku famed for its Shibuya Scramble intersection). It is the local government's budget and policies that determine the access and quality of daycares within its area. 

Despite Japan's population decline and Tokyo's particularly low birth rate, daycare spots are hard to come by in this city. This is especially true for government-funded daycare centers because the tuition is low. M's hoikuen is subsidized, and her tuition is less than half of what we were paying in Chicago. The hoikuen has a sliding scale tuition system: each family's tuition is based on their income. Some families pay more, and some pay less. I think this is a great system. 

What do I love about M's hoikuen? First, the quality of care they provide. The teachers are patient, caring, and attentive. It helps that the student to teacher ratio is low. M has two teachers for the five kids in her class. During the time she wore diapers, she never once returned home with a diaper rash. She also never  returned home with bites - a common occurrence among young toddlers. Maybe there are just no biters in her class, or maybe the teachers intervene quickly enough to prevent it from happening.  

M's day at hoikuen looks somethings like this. After everyone arrives in the morning, they go on a long walk. Sometimes they walk around the neighborhood, and sometimes they go to one of the many nearby parks. The daycare encourages all the toddlers to walk. To make this happen, the kids are divided into small groups so that the teachers can closely supervise everyone. These walks are as long as an hour when the weather is nice. After some playtime, it's lunchtime. Food is prepared on site by a cook. At the beginning of each month, we receive the lunch menu for that month. A typical meal is fish with rice, veggies on the side, miso soup, and fruits. Then it is nap time, followed by an afternoon walk and an afternoon snack, like rice cakes. Before pick up, the kids might work on crafts projects or have free play. 

Although I like M's hoikuen very much, there are some unexpected rules that I had to get used to. Here they are: 

• Sewing my daughter's name onto her blanket (as opposed to writing it or using a name sticker). I can barely sew a button onto a shirt, let alone a name. 

• Packing an extra outfit every day. This is because they change her after lunch, when her morning outfit would ostensibly get dirty. I don't think this is necessary to do everyday since she keeps two extra sets of clothes at daycare anyways. 

• No dresses, buttons, hair accessories, or hoods. Basically, nothing that can get "caught" or pulled by other kids. I thought this was excessively cautious. 

• Not allowing mittens in the winter on the basis that M would not be able to use all ten fingers to break a potential fall. Also no gloves because her classmates might get jealous of cute gloves, and then everybody would want gloves...in the winter. 

• This one was a big hurdle for us because it dealt with toilet training. It seems norms have changed in the last few decades in Japan. Or perhaps our daycare's kids are outliers. Either way, I was under the impression that Japanese kids became toilet trained significantly earlier than their American peers. It seems I was wrong. M no longer wears a diaper at home, with the exception of sleeping at night. However, the hoikuen said, due to staffing reasons, M could only go without a diaper for what amounts to an hour and a half during the day. While we explained that M rarely has accidents and is already trained, they responded that toddlers become potty trained in the three year old class. M was way too early. This confused me, because they had been encouraging M to sit on the toilet since she was a year and a half old. It also shocked me that the age they cited was three years old. 

Despite this, I think hoikuen has been an excellent experience for M. It is structured and nurturing. I know she will be happy, engaged, and well cared for when I drop her off in the mornings. And when we pick her up, she sometimes doesn't want to leave. They have also taught her skills that I don't think I would have been able to teach as effectively - group learning is amazing. Here is another post I wrote about Japanese kids and some differences in how they are raised compared to American kids. M will eventually join her sister at an English speaking primary school. However, having now experienced a Japanese Hoikuen, there is nowhere else I would rather M be at this age.