As Birth Rates Fall, What Should Kindergartens Do? Demand-Side Supply and Positioning Research

On the first day of school in September, a private kindergarten in Baoji, Shaanxi, took children into classrooms in the morning and announced closure in the afternoon, leaving 80 families to be reassigned; around the same week, "chain reactions of declining births" and "kindergarten opens in the morning, closes in the afternoon" hit the trending lists. News like this makes many private kindergarten operators instinctively commission a "parent satisfaction survey" to see where the curriculum, meals, or price disappoint. But a satisfaction questionnaire cannot save a shrinking market: in 2025 China had 231,900 kindergartens with 32,255,200 children in preschool education, and enrollment had fallen by about 3.58 million from the previous year. Most institutions face structural demand-side change, not a service problem of their own making.

Against falling births, the first question for kindergarten research is not "how satisfied are parents with us" but "how many families in this area still need kindergarten, when will they enroll, why do they choose you, and why do they leave." The right move is to relocate the research focus from internal satisfaction to household enrollment decisions: first judge whether the situation is structural contraction or case-level attrition, then use five question groups—entry timing, care alternatives, price-quality trade-offs, quality signals and trust, and withdrawal reasons—across enrolled, comparing, and not-enrolling families, with separate statistics and conclusions for each.

Judge First: Structural Contraction or Case-Level Attrition

The two situations demand completely different responses, so check two datasets before commissioning: regional births and age-eligible children, plus your own enrollment and withdrawal destinations. Nationally, births have trended down since 2017, reaching about 9.02 million in 2023 and rebounding to 9.54 million in 2024 (the National Bureau of Statistics commentary explicitly notes that women of prime childbearing age are still declining and the rebound needs continued observation); the Ministry of Education's 2025 statistical communique reports 231,900 kindergartens and 32,255,200 children in preschool education, with 91.49% in public-interest (inclusive) kindergartens. Convert these into a "age-eligible children for the next three years" figure for your area. If the decline in new enrollments matches the decline in age-eligible children, you face structural contraction—the question is not how to retain students but whether and as what positioning this kindergarten should continue. If enrollment falls noticeably more than the regional decline in eligible children, case-level attrition exists—only then dig into why parents leave.

The Baoji incident is another situation entirely: the kindergarten's license had expired and was not renewed—a compliance case in which parents lost their seats involuntarily, unrelated to choice. When using such incidents as background, separate them from voluntary transfers due to dissatisfaction; otherwise compliance issues get mislabeled as service-competition problems.

Five Demand-Side Question Groups: Replace "Satisfaction" with "Decisions"

Together these answer "how big is the demand, when does it release, and who will satisfy it." Operators who only run satisfaction surveys usually assume demand is given and attrition means they underperformed; decision-based research allows the conclusion that "the market itself is shrinking"—which is valuable because it determines whether the next step is contraction, conversion to integrated childcare, serving as an inclusive option, or differentiated positioning.

Three Family Types, Three Denominators

Demand-side research must not sample only current parents; that systematically overstates loyalty. Segment into at least three groups and state a denominator for each:

• Enrolled families: answer retention and recommendation. Focus on "if the price rises or classes merge next year, would you stay" and the real triggers of transfer. Denominator: current enrolled families.
• Comparing families: households with a child within a year of enrollment who are actively comparing kindergartens. They answer when demand releases and the selection criteria. Denominator: local age-eligible families planning to enroll, including those also comparing public kindergartens.
• Families who skipped or delayed enrollment: children already of age but not enrolled, or cared for at home. They answer the decision structure and conditions of "not sending"—economic reasons, no suitable option, or family preference. This group is the hardest to recruit and the most ignored, yet it is where demand elasticity lives.

In all three groups, the respondent should be the "primary decision-making parent": ask who mainly handles the child's enrollment arrangements first, then confirm the same person completes the questionnaire, avoiding proxy answers from family members who do not participate in the decision. Who answers determines whose choice the data represent.

Illustrative Worked Example: Attrition Diagnosis Versus Regional Structure

The following fully illustrative example shows how two different conclusions come from the same research; it does not represent any real institution or WeJot data. Suppose an urban private kindergarten has 180 currently enrolled households and lost 30 over the past year (an attrition rate of about 16.7%), while the number of age-eligible children on the street fell 8% due to falling births. Follow-up interviews with the lost families classify the reasons:

Compare the 8% regional decline in eligible children with the enrollment drop: if this kindergarten's enrollment fell 20%, about 12 percentage points of the gap cannot be explained by structure; of those, the 6 quality-dissatisfied households are controllable in-house, while the 7 moving to inclusive/public kindergartens point to a price-positioning problem under inclusive expansion rather than a service problem. The report's conclusions should split into three layers: the structural gap (regional), the price-positioning gap (policy and competition), and the quality gap (fixable in-house). Mixing all three into one sentence of "enrollment is falling" is no diagnosis at all.

Ask About the "Choice Set" Rather Than "Price"

Directly asking "what monthly fee can you accept" yields vague bidding, because parents never discuss price apart from what they could switch to. More informative approaches ask about the choice set and trade-offs:

1. List the actually available options in the area (this kindergarten, other private kindergartens, inclusive kindergartens, public kindergartens, childcare institutions, home care), ask parents to rank them by current preference, and explain which attributes they compared;
2. Offer two price-quality bundles and ask which they would be more likely to keep (for example, "same fee but larger classes" versus "10% higher fee with unchanged staff ratios");
3. Then ask "under what conditions would you leave this kindergarten"—written departure conditions predict real attrition better than vague satisfaction.

Quality-signal items matter equally: parents judge "is it good" through word of mouth, visits, monitoring visibility, license disclosures, and teacher stability. If research shows decisions rely heavily on signals that are hard to verify, the institution needs to turn quality into verifiable demonstration rather than simply cutting price.

Under Public Expansion, Research Must Answer Positioning

Nationally, more than nine in ten enrolled preschool children are in public-interest kindergartens, and prices between public and private options have converged, narrowing the private price advantage. The question "will parents pay a premium" therefore becomes "which kind of premium will they pay": closer distance, longer operating hours, smaller class sizes, or specific curriculum and care services. Research should be built around these differentiable attributes rather than assuming "cheap will attract people." Policy boundaries must also be stated: public kindergarten supply, inclusive subsidy standards, and licensing requirements vary by region and change over time; conclusions from a regional sample apply only to the region's current policy, and any policy reference should follow the latest local education-administration position.

Running This Research in WeJot

WeJot can split the three family types into three distribution paths: anonymous surveys for enrolled families from the roster; screening for comparing families by "child around age 3 with local enrollment plans"; and targeted community and online recruitment for families who skipped enrollment, with quotas by care structure. Price-quality trade-off items use bundle comparison; withdrawal reasons use codable multi-select with open supplements; quality-signal items collect parents' real information channels. For defining the primary decision-making parent, see defining the target survey population; if the conclusion must support an expansion-versus-contraction investment decision, fix the denominators (enrolled, locally eligible, planning to enroll) and the scope of each conclusion in the analysis plan first—see writing the analysis plan before collection.

The companion kindergarten supply-demand and enrollment decision survey template contains the three family modules, choice-set and withdrawal-reason items, and can be generated and adapted to your region. Declining births are not a slogan; they are a set of measurable household decisions. Replacing "satisfaction anxiety" with a "decision map" is how an institution finds its place in a shrinking market.