Smartphone apps are helping parents and child care workers reduce mountains of paperwork and troublesome tasks normally required to keep track of the youngsters’ health and activities.

A government push and ramifications from the COVID-19 pandemic are further accelerating the trend.

The CoDMON child care app has been particularly popular.

The number of facilities using the app doubled from 4,000 in January 2020 to more than 8,000 in April this year.

Osaka city in June had CoDMON in place at its 57 public day care centers, while Inuyama city in Aichi Prefecture adopted the system at 12 public nurseries in April.

Iizuka city in Fukuoka Prefecture made the app available at six public nurseries and designated day care educational institutes in May.

A source in the child care industry said an estimated 50 to 60 percent of facilities have introduced CoDMON and other support apps.

For parents, the apps eliminate the searches for crumpled handouts in their children’s bags in the busy morning hours before taking them to care facilities.

A woman, 39, in Tokyo’s Meguro Ward has been using the CoDMON app for nearly two years.

Her 2-year-old daughter attends a day care center in the ward, and the app acts as a substitute for the communication notebook between parents and teachers.

The mother uses the app to send daily data to nursery staff, such as her daughter’s morning and night-before meals, her sleeping and waking times, and her early morning body temperature.

Notices from the center are also delivered through the service. Online exchanges can be printed in notebook form for storage.

When notebooks were used, the mother often struggled to find a pen to jot down her daughter’s meals before taking her to the center.

But she can now enter such information on the app on her way to work or when her husband takes the girl to the center.

The woman said she told her in-laws about the app, and they now share the service account to check on their granddaughter’s progress at the nursery.

“The app is convenient because we can retrospectively check past notifications,” the mother said. “It has become far easier with the communications app for my family to share data on child rearing, compared with its paper counterpart.”

SAVING LABOR

The hugmo and Kids Diary apps provide similar services to CoDMON.

They allow day care workers’ smartphones or tablet computers at entrances or in classrooms to receive messages from parents and keep records on the children’s arrivals and departures.

Nurseries and kindergartens are aggressively digitizing to ease the workload of employees and create a friendlier working environment.

The Higashi Urawa Midori day care center in Saitama outside Tokyo started using CoDMON in September 2019.

Vice Director Koji Isobe took the initiative in his second year there to “lighten the burden on staff.”

Previously, instruction plans and attendance records for each child had to be written by hand.
Isobe feels that digitizing these processes has made it easier for the employees.

“The system’s introduction is essential for us to secure excellent personnel as competition is intensifying among day nursery operators,” Isobe said.

Aki Fukoin, head of a parents’ group working on issues connected to day care centers, welcomed the increased use of apps.

“Digitizing kids’ daily records and child care plans at these facilities will make clerical tasks more efficient and contribute to a higher quality of care,” Fukoin said.

The central government is backing the endeavor.

Earlier this year, the labor ministry released guidelines to lighten the workload at care facilities. The guidelines urge workers to take paid leave, review their work styles and use information and computing technology.

Day care centers and kindergartens are now eligible for up to 1 million yen ($9,100) in subsidies for using support apps.

PANDEMIC STIMULATES DEMAND

The rapid spread of assistant apps comes at a time when social distancing is encouraged to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Care facilities are refraining from inviting parents and guardians for visits as a precaution.
Photos and videos of the children at the centers are now more frequently used.

Vish Inc. runs such support apps as Bus Catch and Renraku Apuri for nurseries and kindergartens in Nagoya. In April, it teamed with Tokyo-based Smarteducation Ltd., which operates video distribution service KitS Ochien.

“The demand for making care facilities ‘visible’ has grown amid the coronavirus crisis,” said a Vish representative, explaining the collaboration.

Fukoin said, “Easy sharing of images and videos among guardians and child care facilities will prove effective in building relationships of trust.”

She noted that some caution is needed.

“Establishments need to pay attention to prevent child care workers from concentrating so much on taking images and videos that they forget to interact sufficiently with children or fail to notice kids in danger,” Fukoin said.