Parent-Child Distances and Spatial Usage in a Regional Parenting Support Facility

Abstract

This paper investigates parent-and-child spatial usages and parents attention to their children in a regional parenting support facility. The positions of all parents and children with parents' head directions were mapped every 5 minutes, trajectories of 10 families were traced, and questionnaire for parents were conducted. The investigation reveals that spatial usage and attention strongly depends on parent-and-child distances. When a parent and child was close to each other, they preferred to stay together on rugs and parent's attention was relatively scattered. The amount of parents' communication time measured by the traced survey was shorter than their perception.