Talk:Child care

Childcare and benefits/subsidies

Hi, lately I have been trying to make sense of the articles concerning Child care and a couple of issues have come up. So here are some ideas.

The 'main' article Child care contains a lot of information, and the subparts about the USA, Mexico and UK have just exploded. Also the subject of childcare benefits/subsidies has been somewhat interwoven, but by the complexity of benefits it can easily overtake the whole article. Also discoverability of the subject of infant care got me wondering. On each of these points follows some more.

In the case of the USA there also exists Child and family services, which seems to be a purely USA based organization and literally has a section about childcare in the USA. To improve readability it would be better to move the majority to a designated page Childcare in the USA or combine it with Child and family services. This also reduces scattering of information. A couple of internal article links will probably be helpful for faster finding each page.

In the case of Mexico a new page is needed. A lot of background about ongoing debates and considerations are included, which does not give a quick overview of what is the (current) situation. It seems as if one editor has gathered a lot of information and made a big effort, but it contains so many details that it deserves its own page, and maybe discussion about what should be included and what not.

In the case of the UK, the article starts with England and it never becomes clear whether any of the information is also relevant for Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. Scotland is only mentioned in the last paragraph. As each of the four parts of the UK can make their own policies, there probably are differences, but in this case it is hard to say if there are any. In my opinion a choice should be made between shortly mentioning the situation in each part of the UK, or (re)writing a more general text about the system in the UK and moving differences into the mentioned article Child care in the United Kingdom.

On infantcare: the page Child care starts with mentioning that the page covers care for children from two weeks of age. In the case of Spain this results in mentioning maternity leave, and Norway mentioning parental leave, and in both cases not much else. Should parentail leave policies be included or not? Also, should infantcare be explicitly mentioned in the introduction as to clarify that it belongs here, and should infantcare redirect to this page for now?

On childcare benefits/subsidies: almost every developed country has some form of childcare subsidy, also under the names of 'benefit', 'out of school care subsidy', 'infantcare subsidy', 'subsidy benefits', 'fee support' or 'assistance'. At this moment this information is partially interwoven into Child care, where for some countries it is the sole text and for others it is not mentioned at all. This shows to me that many people interpret the purpose of this page differently. In the introduction of the page the word 'payments' is only shortly mentioned, under which one could include subsidies. By the nature of subsidies each country can make its own choices, thus making for complex and long texts very quickly. Would it be useful to create a separate article on Childcare subsidy, maybe similar to Child benefit? Or is the choice to keep it in this article, thus making explicit that 'payments' includes subsidies? Or a combination with short mentioning of the benefit amounts and referral to an overview article and if available a country specific page?

A lot of issues, and I am wondering what would be good solutions. Frisie (talk) 09:59, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

No, there doesnt need to be a new article for child care in the us, and the information in the US should not be combined with child and family services. Child care in the US is separate in almost all cases from the child and family services. Child care is regulated at a state level, and is different in every state. That implies child care for each state in the US to be merged with its state department, (ie childcare history/culture/practices in florida section in the department of children and families) which would not work. but regardless the information in the article is about common practices and history and culture of public/private day cares in the us, not of a government sector. An article being long/full of information is not in it of itself a problem, and formatting/deleting unimportant information can improve readability.

I personally dont think Parental leave has a place in the article, unless to once mention how parental leave affects the needs for childcare

for your last paragraph, a way to improve the article would be to define subsidies, mention them when they are relevant and remove redundant/incorrect/excessive mentions of subsidies

if you can cite any wikipedia guidelines that would support any of your suggestions id be down to hear. Right now the main article/us section is just not of good enough quality to split off into more articles. There is hardly enough concise/well sourced info in the original article.

for the UK part, and also in general, i would recommend aiming to add instead of remove. If it mentions england and scotland and not the rest, add brief information about the rest of the UK rather than remove the information and restate it to be less comprehensive. Its already there, why not.

I am also trying to work on/improve readability this article, so if you have anything else you noticed/like to discuss, feel free to ping me !

thanks :) Sydpresscott (talk) 02:26, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Also, this may be contradictory to my last post lol, but there are a lot of dead links on this article, or claims that are unsourced or the source/claim is unreliable/inappropriate for wikipedia. A good way to quickly condense/ improve readability/quality on this article is to get rid of those. A lot of references throughout this article have “US” next to the number in the reference bubble, and almost all of those citations/sections need to be verified as accurate/working citations and checked for grammar, (almost all of them are not) i think they are all from the same person. Sydpresscott (talk) 02:31, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi Syd, great that you are working on this article. At the moment I have no time myself, so I will leave it to your judgement to try and get some shape in it.

The main issue with reading for instance the US section, is that it contains many political details about budgeting laws, state policies that may exist and might be accredited under unspecified standards, and many numbers and percentages are mentioned for some years but without context, trends and often with the 'US' numbers which you mentioned. The contributions of for instance senators Lamar Alexander and Barbare Mikulski tell me little to non if I want to compare say three different systems/countries within 30 minutes.

Here is a wikipedia guideline that discusses article size, Wikipedia:Article size, discussing article length and guidance on structuring and moving information. And a guideline for readability, Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable. And a guideline about the many numbers and names without context or trends, Wikipedia:NOTDB.

Again, best of luck. Frisie (talk) 18:37, 29 December 2023 (UTC)