Peer-reviewed article
Nurturing care in the first 10 years of life: Results from a Vietnamese longitudinal study
Lan Mai Tran, Aryeh D. Stein, Phuong Hong Nguyen, Melissa Fox Young, Usha Ramakrishnan ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study tracked 1,040 mother-child pairs in Vietnam from before birth through age 10 to measure five dimensions of nurturing care: health, nutrition, safety/security, learning, and relationships. Nurturing care scores varied across these five dimensions and across childhood stages, ranging from 0.45 to 0.83 on a scale of 0 to 1. Children whose mothers had higher education levels showed nurturing care scores that were 0.1 to 0.2 points higher. The findings reveal significant gaps in nurturing care provision across Vietnam's early childhood period.
Key points
- Five nurturing care dimensions (health, nutrition, safety/security, learning, relationships) were measured from preconception through ages 2, 6, and 10 years
- Mean nurturing care scores ranged from 0.45 to 0.83 across dimensions and life stages, indicating gaps in achieving optimal nurturing care
- Children of mothers with higher schooling levels had nurturing care scores 0.1-0.2 points higher than those with lower education
- Small differences (0.03-0.06 points) in scores were observed between ethnic groups, with no significant differences between boys and girls
- Most nurturing care dimensions showed positive correlations with each other across study periods (r range: 0.03-0.38)
Limitations
This study describes the distribution and correlations of nurturing care dimensions but does not establish causal relationships or test interventions to improve nurturing care. The findings are specific to Vietnam and may not generalize to other regions.
Abstract
Nurturing care (NC) is essential for children to meet their optimal development potential. However, the various NC dimensions and their patterns from preconception through adolescence have not been comprehensively documented. This study explored five NC dimensions (health, nutrition, safety/security, learning, and relationships) using prospectively collected data from 1040 mother-child dyads in a birth cohort conducted in Vietnam from 2011 to 2023. We described distributions of age-specific variables of the NC dimensions from preconception through ages 2, 6, and 10 years, and generated scaled scores that ranged from 0 to 1. Mean scores varied across dimensions and life stages (range: 0.45-0.83). The scores were 0.1-0.2 points higher among mothers with higher schooling levels. Smaller differences (0.03-0.06 points) in scores were also observed between ethnicities, but no significant difference was observed between boys and girls. We observed positive correlations among most of the five dimensions within each study period (r range: 0.03-0.38). The variation of NC dimensions across different time points indicates a need to measure NC across life stages. Our findings demonstrate important gaps in gaining full achievement in NC from preconception through age 10 years.