Relationship between caregivers'reading habits and their child’s oral health

Abstract

Objective: To describe the relationship between caregiver’s multilingual reading habits and the oral health status of pre-school children in Hong Kong Method: A random sample of three hundred and one child/parent dyads was recruited from the kindergartens in Hong Kong Island. Eligibility criteria included the caregivers who were able to speak Cantonese and read traditional Chinese script. The caregiver’s self-reports of socio-demographics and multilingual reading habits were collected. Two locally-developed and validated oral health literacy assessment tasks, Hong Kong Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Dentistry-30 (HKREALD-30) and Hong Kong Oral Health Literacy Assessment Task for Paediatric Dentistry (HKOHLAT-P), were administered to caregivers to assess their oral health literacy levels. Children’s oral health status was assessed [dental caries experience- dmft and oral hygiene status- Visible Plaque Index (VPI)]

Results: The results ascertained that the caregivers’ practice of reading print Chinese was significantly associated with the caregivers’ oral health literacy scores (p<0.001). Moreover, the caregivers’ English reading habits were more significantly associated with the child’s dmft (p<0.001) compared to that of the Chinese reading habits (p=.001).

Conclusion: Reading texts in an additional language (i.e. English in this case) is significantly associated with child’s oral health status, indicating that Caregivers’ multilingual literacy—especially involving a lingua franca for medical and health knowledge, can be a protective factor for child health. This abstract is based on research that was funded entirely or partially by an outside source: Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Ref: 760009)