Parental Self-Efficacy and Family Support in Oral Health and Nutrition of Children With Disabilities.

Everything was measured at one time point, so the study can show which things go together but not which causes which. All answers, including toothache, brushing habits and dental visits, came from parents and none were checked against a dental examination. Disability type was known for only 64 of the 195 children and came from parents rather than clinical records, and the severity of the children's disabilities was not recorded at all, so the findings may not hold equally across disability groups. The nutrition and physical activity scale performed only moderately well in this sample (alpha = 0.66, just under the usual 0.70), so the nutrition results are the least reliable in the paper. Parents were recruited by convenience rather than at random and only 30.8% said they would have felt prepared for the child's disability, so the authors advise caution in generalising to all Turkish families of children with disabilities. The six predictors together explained only about 17% of the differences in parents' confidence, leaving most of what shapes it unmeasured.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest, and under funding they state they have nothing to report.

Do not treat the 61% toothache figure as a measured rate of dental disease. It is what parents reported and was not checked against a dental examination, and the authors themselves say it cannot be read as proof that preventive dental services are failing these families. Do not read the links between family support, education or social security and parental confidence as causal, or as evidence that changing any of them would improve a child's oral health: everything was measured at a single time point in a convenience sample.