Affordable, good quality childcare creates opportunities for many parents to better reconcile work and care or reduces family care to enable other valuable contributions to society. However, childcare studies often overlook parents of children with additional or complex care needs. These parents spend a greater amount of time on caregiving, providing care that goes beyond that of parents of typically developing children. As such, their opportunities beyond caregiving can be limited. Resources, like childcare services, can be crucial in supporting the reconciliation of care with other valued activities in life. This article contributes to the cross-national childcare policy literature by conceptualizing comparative indicators to assess the availability, accessibility, and affordability of childcare policy design for children with additional or complex care needs. It then applies these indicators to a comparison of childcare policy design in England and the Netherlands, providing an operationalization for further empirical analysis.

This paper examines the extent to which the influence of Confucianism on the welfare of women erects barriers to the gender mainstreaming (GM) of childcare policy in Hong Kong. GM is a global strategy adopted by the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995. Adopting a context-sensitive approach in understanding the translation of the international concept of GM in the policy formation and practice in Hong Kong, we find that the Confucian welfare model has profound impact on women's welfare and the effectiveness of GM in Hong Kong. First, childcare support for the family is far from adequate due to the perception of childcare as the individual family's responsibility rather than as a citizen right. Second, the gender-neutral discourse commonly accepted by the policy-makers in Hong Kong reflects the inadequate gender-sensitivity training of government officials. Third, GM has been “watered down” as a technical tool instead of transforming gender inequality in the society.