Uncovering childcare struggles through topic modeling

Challenges with accessing reliable childcare are a main source of distress for many families with young children. Research has documented the detrimental effects of lack of access to stable and reliable care on caregivers and children, but little is known about which childcare-related challenges and impacts caregivers themselves perceive as most central. We bridge this gap by leveraging biterm topic modeling, a natural language processing technique, to analyze large-scale open-ended survey data, identify common themes brought up by parents when talking about childcare, and examine covariation with family characteristics. A six-topic solution was selected, clustered around two metatopics: access barriers and precarity experiences and psychosocial impacts of childcare challenges. Family characteristics, including child disability, identifying as female, identifying as Black, and having any higher education, were credibly associated with the likelihood of topic emergence in Bayesian regression models, with evidence varying in strength. Future work should focus on accurately measuring different dimensions of childcare challenges, as well as gauging causal and temporal relations between such challenges, family characteristics, and family outcomes. Policy and decision makers may use these and similar data to infer families' priorities when it comes to childcare. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).