[Childcare], [Daycare], do we even care?

Question

We have currently two tags seemingly referring to the very same thing:

daycare Currently 78 questions
Usage guidance:

Social interactions, subject matter addressed, safety at daycare centers, choosing a daycare center, staff behavior, and other issues related to daycare centers.

childcare Currently 33 questions
No usage guidance

I quote the wikipedia entry on childcare

Child care, or otherwise known as daycare, is the care and supervision of a child or multiple children at a time, whose ages range from six weeks to thirteen years. Child care is the action or skill of looking after children by a day-care center, nannies, babysitter, teachers or other providers. Child care is a broad topic that covers a wide spectrum of professionals, institutions, contexts, activities, and social and cultural conventions.

Most of these are already covered by existing other tags: - daycare for daycare centers, kindergarden etc. - babysitting for babysitters (also use it for nannies or child minders?) - school / teacher for everything school-related

Does this leave any use for a specific childcare tag?

Glancing at the questions taggged childcare, it's noticeable that childcare is used for questions about

• babysitters -> babysitting

1, 2 (child minder), 3 (babysitter vs child minder), 4 (nanny cam), 5 (nanny), 6 (nanny share), 7 (nanny)

• daycare / kindergarden -> daycare

1 (yes, added by me when I was still young and foolish), 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

• "I care about my child", hence "childcare"

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (or maybe babysitter), 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

When it's used as a synonym of daycare, it provides much better UX for them to all to be tagged daycare, so questions can be filtered accordingly.

The "I care about my child" usage seems unnecessary. People who don't care about their children would else probably not ask here. Its usage reminds me of parenting or child. It can be removed.

And then there are cases when it's used as a synonym of "babysitter". An interesting question is whether babysitting should also encompass "child minder" and "nanny"? If not, I'd rather suggest specific tags for those, and not a tag like childcare that could mean everything.

What's your opinion on these tags?

Answer 1

I suggest we use daycare for institutions with employees, like kindergardens. It has been used to tag such questions much more often and is more clear.

In principle, childcare might be a useful tag, but it turned out not to be, in my opinion. Instead, it became some kind of a wastebasket tag with most questions not related to daycare or even babysitting. This defeats the purpose of a tag, which is to allow filtering questions. E. g. if you want to know how to deal with your 9-year-old, search for middle-childhood and you won't have to wade through questions about breastfeeding newborns, for example.

If you want advice on something daycare-related, you should be able to conveniently use daycare. But now, you'll not only find not all of them, since some are tagged childcare, searching for childcare will also lead to many unrelated questions (23 out of 33).

Since childcare is misused so often, I do not even believe it should become daycare's tag synonym. This would just necessitate further editing of new questions tagged daycare, when they are not about daycare.