The meat-flesh radical (a left-side variant of 肉, distinct from moon-月) sits underneath as the indexing radical. It grounds the abstract idea of birth and nurturing in the body, linking 育 to 胎, 胞 and other anatomy chars.
Dot-and-horizontal cap functions as a small positional lid above the rest of the character — a residual marker with no standalone reading. Historically the head of an upside-down child glyph: oracle-bone 育 showed a baby emerging head-first, and this lid is what survives of that newborn's crown.
Below the cap, this curl is the body of the inverted child being born. Read together with 亠 it forms a tiny upside-down 子 — the newborn slipping out — which is the original semantic core of bringing forth life.
