women and children (UNICEF, 1990). Care has received considerable
attention during the 1990s as an important element in improving mothers’
and children’s nutritional status. The original conceptual model developed by
the UNICEF defined care as ‘the provision in the household and the
community of time, attention and support to meet the physical, mental, and
social needs of the growing child and other household members’. An
‘extended’ conceptual model of care developed by Engle et al. (1999)
provides a more detailed conceptual apparatus of both care practices and
important household and community-level resources. They characterize
behavior patterns into:
1. care for pregnant and lactating women
2. breastfeeding and complementary feeding of young children
3. food preparation and food storage behaviors
4. hygiene behaviors
5. care for children during illness.
The resources for care were classified into six main categories:
1. education, knowledge, and beliefs
2. health and nutritional status of the care-giver
3. mental health, lack of stress, and self-confidence of the care-giver
4. control of resources and intrahousehold allocation
5. workload and time constraints
6. social support from family members and the community.
Figure 7.2 provides an extended UNICEF model of child-care that includes not
only an assessment of the care-giver’s behavior, but also the behavior of the child
and the characteristics of the environmental context. All the three factors play an
important role in the nutritional status of the child.