The participation of local governments is required to implement public childcare that covers children from birth to age 12, and 16 candidates running for mayor or county commissioner have signed letters committing themselves to pushing through needed policies once elected, the Childcare Policy Alliance said yesterday.
Among the 16 candidates who signed the commitment letters were Taipei mayoral candidates Pasuya Yao (姚文智) of the Democratic Progressive Party , Ting Shou-chung (丁守中) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and incumbent Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).
The alliance presented two line graphs — the rate at which women participate in the workforce and the rate at which children from three months to five years old are cared for outside of the home — with rates listed for Taiwan, Denmark, Germany, Japan and South Korea.
The first graph showed that Taiwanese women aged 25 to 29 had the highest rate of workforce participation among the compared nations, but that from age 30 to 65, the rate steadily dropped off, reflecting the number of women leaving jobs to care for children due to insufficient public childcare, Alliance convener Liu Yu-hsiu (劉毓秀) said.
The second graph showed that, among the compared nations, Taiwan had the lowest rate of childcare outside the home for children under five years old, Liu added.
The alliance said that public childcare coverage was highest in Denmark for all age groups, at nearly 50 percent for children under two years old and 90 percent after two years old, creating an environment friendly to double-income families and encouraging a sustainable level of replacement fertility.
Some couples are unwilling to give birth to more children because the lottery rate for going to public preschools is low and many are worried about the price and quality of private preschools, it said, adding that often the mother or the grandmother must quit their job to care for children.
Awakening Foundation policy director Chyn Yu-rung (覃玉蓉) said she strongly feels that many pregnant women in Taiwan are desperately worried about childcare options, and that having sufficient public childcare would give women the option of continuing to work.
The alliance said that the rate of children under two years old that are enrolled in public nurseries or being cared for by registered babysitters through a subsidy is only about 7 percent, the rate of children aged two to six years old enrolled in public or non-profit preschools is about 19 percent and the rate of elementary-school students enrolled in after-school childcare services is about 14 percent.
The alliance urged local governments to show determination in creating a childcare friendly environment for double-income families, and increasing public and non-profit childcare, with continuous care until the age of 12.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching