Editorial policy

Numbers come from data, not from us

Every percentile, median, rank and count on childow is computed from a published dataset: the WHO Child Growth Standards and CDC 2000 growth charts for growth, CDC’s milestone checklists for development, Social Security card applications for names, and federal recall and directory data for safety. Nothing is typed in by hand where a computed value belongs.

Each source file is downloaded by a script, stored with a SHA-256 checksum and listed on our sources page with its licence, vintage and retrieval date. Our growth engine is tested against the percentile columns in the same CDC files, to within 0.01 of a unit, before every release.

CDC milestones are quoted word for word

Milestone checklist items are copied exactly from CDC’s “Learn the Signs. Act Early.” pages and attributed “Source: CDC”. We do not reword, reorder within a domain or add items. Around each checklist we add our own explanatory text, clearly separate from the quoted items, and CDC’s statement that its materials are not a substitute for standardized, validated developmental screening tools.

CDC’s policy is that its public-domain material may be reused with attribution and without implying endorsement. The checklist pages carry no separate copyright notice. If that ever changes, we will replace the quoted items with our own summaries and link to CDC.

Guides are written by people, from cited sources

Every guide is original text written by childow editorial from primary sources: CDC, AAP and HealthyChildren.org, federal regulations, peer-reviewed papers and professional bodies such as ASHA. Each factual claim is numbered and linked to its source, and the source list is printed at the end. Guides open with a short, numbered answer.

We do not use AI to write health guidance, and no AI runs on your child’s data. Explanations inside the tools, such as the trend sentence or the WHO-versus-CDC decoder, are generated by fixed rules you can read in our code, not by a language model.

Clinical review is shown honestly

A page is labelled clinically reviewed only when a real, credentialed clinician has reviewed it and an administrator has recorded their name, credential and the date. Reviews lapse after 12 months. Until a page has a current review it says “Clinical review: not yet reviewed” and is kept out of search results. We never invent or imply a reviewer. The current status is on our medical review page.

Calm language, never a diagnosis

We describe positions on reference curves, not judgements. We do not call a child or a measurement “abnormal”, “at risk”, “behind” or “failing”, and we never show a child’s data in red. Where it matters we say when to talk to your pediatrician, and that you can always ask if you are worried.

Sample data is always labelled

Fictional children and families used to illustrate a tool or a report always carry a “Sample” tag. We do not publish testimonials, ratings, user counts or “trusted by” claims.

No ads, no affiliate links on health pages

childow has no advertising and no third-party trackers. Growth and milestone pages carry no affiliate links. If labelled affiliate links ever appear elsewhere, for example next to baby gear, they will never appear on health pages.

Corrections

If you find a mistake, tell us through the contact page with the page address and what looks wrong. We check it against the source, fix it, update the page’s “last verified” date and, for anything beyond a typo, add a note at the end of the page describing the change.