الفهرس 
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Abstract
The child is the best resource of the nation and the mother is responsible for teaching their children good eating habits and proper nutritional behaviors.
Improving the mothers’ nutritional awareness can cause changes in nutritional behaviors of their children so the mother should receive continuous educational messages about different nutritional sources and their important.
Vitamin D is an important vitamin not only for calcium and phosphorous metabolism but also for every system in the body as vitamin D receptors present in nearly all systems of the body.
Vitamin D deficiency is a pandemic problem that can be easily prevented by proper education about vitamin D and its sources and importance.
This study is a step to improve mothers’ knowledge regarding vitamin D. This was achieved through assessment of knowledge about vitamin D among mothers of preschool children as regard sources, risk factors, prevention and treatment; also assessment of the effect of interventional educational program about vitamin D.
This is an intervention study that was conducted on 294 mothers from Birket El Sabee district. Two health care facilities out of 18 were selected by simple random sampling technique. The health care center in Birket El Sabee city representing urban health care facilities and Tanbisha health care unit representing rural health care facilities. One hundred ninety-five mothers were selected from family health center and ninety-nine mothers from family health unit.
The mothers of the children were assessed by ’’ the socioeconomic status scale for health research in Egypt’’. Socioeconomic level was classified into very low (score 19-38), middle (score 39-57) and high (score more than 57) depending on the quartiles of the score calculated.
Also participants’ knowledge was assessed by questionnaires about vitamin D, most of mothers didn’t need any help at completing the questionnaire but alliterated mothers received help by reading and explaining some questions.
Mothers were invited to join the family health club and the content of the educational program was conducted in one session and evaluation of the health educational program was done after four months with the same questionnaire.
Scoring of overall knowledge was calculated based on the number of questions answered correctly:
- Good knowledge if total score ≥ 75 % of answers were true.
- Fair knowledge if total score 50%: 74 % of answers were true.
- Poor knowledge if total score <50% of answers were true.
Regarding socio-demographic data of the participants: mothers’ age ranged from 23-32 with mean value 27.718±2.729, most of them have basic education (40.1%), 69% of them were housewives, most of them had enough income (39.1%), the majority of the participants had crowding index of more than four, more than half the participants (67.3%) had middle socioeconomic state and 66.3% of the participants lived in urban area.