The Children's Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) plans to set aside a budget to subsidize daycare costs for middle and low income households with foreign spouses.
At a children and youth welfare conference held by the bureau last week, the budget proposal was brought up as a response to the increasing number of children born to intercultural couples.
"The budget aims to assist households with foreign spouses whose children are aged two years or older and who need pre-school daycare services," the bureau stated last week in a press release.
"The plan to set aside a daycare budget is to assist those families in which the parents may not serve as a source of pre-school education for the children. Also, the budget may prevent delays in the learning process or learning disadvantages for children in interracial families due to incomplete cultural understanding," the bureau said.
According to the bureau, several government offices, including the social, public health and education administrations, are working together to provide counseling services to intercultural families.
"In order to have professional counselors to treat all foreign spouses equally and with respect, starting next year, training workshops will be set up to enable specialized social counselors to learn more about intercultural families. Furthermore, these workshops will help personnel to better assess identity issues for children in such households," the bureau stated.
So far, the bureau has printed pamphlets on the topic of parenting. The pamphlet is called a "Parenting guide for parents with children between the ages of 0 and 3."
The guide has been printed in Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai and English.
A similar guide for parents with older children is currently available in Chinese and is being translated into other languages.
A magnitude 4.9 earthquake struck off Tainan at 11:47am today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The hypocenter was 32.3km northeast of Tainan City Hall at a depth of 7.3km, CWA data showed. The intensity of the quake, which gauges the actual effect of a seismic event, measured 4 in Tainan and Chiayi County on Taiwan's seven-tier intensity scale, the data showed. The quake had an intensity of 3 in Chiayi City and County, and Yunlin County, while it was measured as 2 in Kaohsiung, Nantou County, Changhua County, Taitung County and offshore Penghu County, the data showed. There were no immediate reports of
Weather conditions across Taiwan are expected to remain stable today, but cloudy to rainy skies are expected from tomorrow onward due to increasing moisture in the atmosphere, according to the Central Weather Administration (CWA). Daytime highs today are expected to hit 25-27°C in western Taiwan and 22-24°C in the eastern counties of Yilan, Hualien, and Taitung, data on the CWA website indicated. After sunset, temperatures could drop to 16-17°C in most parts of Taiwan. For tomorrow, precipitation is likely in northern Taiwan as a cloud system moves in from China. Daytime temperatures are expected to hover around 25°C, the CWA said. Starting Monday, areas
Taiwan has recorded its first fatal case of Coxsackie B5 enterovirus in 10 years after a one-year-old boy from southern Taiwan died from complications early last month, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. CDC spokesman Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞) told a news conference that the child initially developed a fever and respiratory symptoms before experiencing seizures and loss of consciousness. The boy was diagnosed with acute encephalitis and admitted to intensive care, but his condition deteriorated rapidly, and he passed away on the sixth day of illness, Lo said. This also marks Taiwan’s third enterovirus-related death this year and the first severe
A Taiwanese software developer has created a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model to help people use AI without exposing sensitive data, project head Huang Chung-hsiao (黃崇校) said yesterday. Huang, a 55-year-old coder leading a US-based team, said that concerns over data privacy and security in popular generative AIs such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek motivated him to develop a personal AI assistant named “Mei.” One of the biggest security flaws with cloud-based algorithms is that users are required to hand over personal information to access the service, giving developers the opportunity to mine user data, he said. For this reason, many government agencies and
RSS