A thorough understanding of interventions aimed at home‐based oral health behaviours can help to improve tailor future interventions and encourage oral health, deduced a systematic review issued in International Journal of Paediatric Dentistry.

Elnaz Aliakbari and colleagues reviewed the interventions encouraging tooth brushing practices under parental guidance for the reduction of dental caries in young children aged less than 8 years. Literature search included exploring the Web of Science, PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Scopus, and the Cochrane Library along with other references, and unpublished literature records.

All in all 42 articles were included. Intervention content was coded with the key domains focused being knowledge (in 41 articles), skills (35 articles), and environmental context and resources (22 articles) with the help of the Theoretical Domains Framework. There were limited reports of the intervention development, delivery, and evaluation, with only 18 studies being supported by theory. Mixed outcomes were found in 29 studies which discovered the influence on caries.

Given a few interventions targeting oral health behaviours at home encouraged by theory and methodological rigour in their development and assessment, the study investigators promoted further interventions to be directed by complex intervention methodology.