Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) Department of Child Studies operated a cultural arts education program using visual arts to help primary caregivers of infants and toddlers reconnect with the "self" they had temporarily set aside during caregiving, and received strong positive responses. The project "Sensory Recovery Project for Parents — Nevertheless, We," which included Professor Jeong Yujin and Instructor Hwang Mijin from the Department of Child Studies as collaborative researchers, completed all educational sessions on the 20th. The program was praised for enabling participants to express their emotions and needs and to reflect on their caregiving time in their own words.

The program was organized as part of the 2026 Community-Based Cultural Arts Education Support Project "Gagahoho," hosted by the Jeonju Cultural Foundation. Fifteen primary caregivers in Jeonju raising children aged 0–36 months participated in two cohorts. Each cohort was run as a four-session program. The visual arts activities for each session were led by artists Sumin Lee and Yu Jeong.

Whereas traditional parent education for early childhood has emphasized understanding child development and acquiring caregiving skills, this program turned the focus to the caregivers themselves. At a time when childcare occupies most of daily life, the program aimed to help participants temporarily set aside their role as "caregivers," attend to their own emotions and needs, and recover their capacity for self-care.

The program was structured to help participants discover themselves as individuals, reflect on their emotions and caregiving time, and approach their future selves. In the first session, "My Pieces," participants collected words that described themselves and assembled them into a tree to express multiple aspects of their lives. In "Today's Self-Portrait," they practiced blind contour drawing, creating a portrait by relying on fingertip sensation rather than looking in a mirror.

In the third activity, "Small Clothes, Big Heart," participants used their child's outgrown garments as a recording medium to visually reconstruct moments of caregiving. In the final activity, "A Picture Letter to Myself," they created a time capsule containing a letter to themselves one year later, capturing their present feelings and future hopes.

The JBNU Department of Child Studies research team specified the program's purpose and educational objectives and systematized the links between activities so that each artistic exercise could lead to caregivers' self-care and emotional recovery. By combining expertise in family studies and arts education, they developed an educational model that interprets and expresses caregivers' experiences in new ways.

Support from JBNU's National University Promotion Project was also provided. Four undergraduate students from the Department of Child Studies who participated in the project assisted with program operations and took part in the research process of organizing and analyzing data collected in the field. It was meaningful that undergraduates directly experienced how field-based educational experience becomes research data and then develops into academic outcomes.

The research team plans to analyze the program's design, implementation, and participants' experiences as case studies and present the findings at professional family studies conferences and in academic journals.

Professor Jeong Yujin said, "When caregiving becomes one's entire daily life, it is difficult to notice what one feels and what one needs. Rather than teaching ways to become a better parent, the goal was to provide a space for caregivers to meet themselves again as individuals."

She added, "Students are also participating in the process in which the experience accumulated in the field is organized into data and leads to research. That undergraduates can directly experience the connection between educational practice and research is another important significance of this project."