The importance of nurturing care for children’s development has been emphasised in the global literature. Although societal risk factors which may hinder nurturing care in South Africa have been extensively documented, the goals, beliefs and practices of caregivers in infancy have received less attention in the literature. This qualitative study was conducted with mothers of children aged 6 to 10 months in Soweto. Data were collected during focus group discussions held in May 2023 with 26 mothers, then analysed using thematic analysis. We found that mothers view themselves as playing an active role in their children’s learning and development, and are broadly aware of the importance of nurturing care. Our findings also emphasise that nurturing care is bidirectional, and based on the relationship between caregivers and children, both of whom should be viewed as individuals. This study contributes to relatively limited literature on infancy in South Africa and can help to inform context-appropriate interventions to improve early childhood development in comparable settings.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

This work was funded through internal seed funding aiming to increase collaboration between University College London and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits-UCL Research/Teaching collaborative activity Seed Fund 2022/23). The funder played no role in the design, analysis, or writing for this study.

I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.

Yes

The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

Ethical approval was received from the Human Research Ethics Committee (Medical) at the University of the Witwatersrand (M190449) in South Africa and from the University College London Research Ethics Committee (14657/003) in the United Kingdom. Prior to data collection, all participants provided written and verbal informed consent to participate in FGDs, and for the FGDs to be recorded.

I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals.

Yes

I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).

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I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable.

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The authors do not have permission to share the data for this study, due to ethical concerns from the University of the Witwatersrand Human Resource Ethics Committee about sharing qualitative interview data outside of the research team. This is because the focus group discussions and the de-identified transcripts thereof contain potentially identifying and sensitive participant information. Data can be made available to interested researchers upon request to the HREC (Medical) at the University of the Witwatersrand: hrec-medical.researchoffice@wits.ac.za.