“Love, You Need to Give Your Child Love”: Mothers’ Perceptions of Nurturing Care for Young Children in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Nurturing care of young children is aimed at promoting lifelong, intergenerational health and well‐being, as well as social and economic benefits. This study is aimed at qualitatively exploring maternal perceptions related to nurturing care, their access to information and support for caregiving, the home and community environments and practices, and how caregivers promote infants’ health and well‐being in Soweto, South Africa. Methods: The study employed a sequential, two‐stage process. First, three focus group discussions were conducted with a total of 19 mothers of children aged 0–24 months, which then informed 12 in‐depth interviews (four women from each focus group discussion). Focus group discussions and interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim and data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: The health and well‐being of infants were generally described in relation to their feeding and growth and how physically active they were. The need for pregnancy and caregiving information, accompanied by opportunities to discuss this with a health care worker or other women, was highlighted by participants in this study. Potentially obesogenic and non‐responsive infant and young child feeding practices were commonly reported by mothers. Responsive caregiving was described as taking care of children’s physical needs, providing them with love, and playing with them. Female matriarchs were particularly influential in providing caregiving advice and support for mothers. Naturally occurring interactions, such as talking and singing, were commonly reported practices to promote children’s development in the home. Safety concerns were ubiquitous and limited children’s play and exploration outside the home. Conclusions: This is one of few studies to explore caregivers’ perceptions of nurturing care in the South African context and the first to focus specifically on the first 1000 days. Thus, the study findings can contribute to strengthening initiatives to support caregivers to provide nurturing care for young children in South Africa and other similar contexts. Findings point to the need for better targeted information and support for mothers and other caregivers around nurturing care, especially elements related to infant and young child feeding (including responsive feeding), responsive care, early learning, and how to address safety in the home. There is also a gap in the provision of appropriate information and opportunities to engage with peers and health care workers around issues pertinent to pregnant women within current services. These deficiencies can be addressed through strengthening existing services, leveraging current platforms of care and support for pregnant women and young children, particularly through the health system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".