Vitamin A is of utmost importance for health and survival of children. A recent series in The Lancet on maternal and child health put vitamin A deficiency at the top of most important micronutrient deficiencies, responsible for more than 600.000 child deaths/year worldwide. Vitamin A status of mothers and infants is closely linked. Hence, a mother with vitamin A deficiency cannot give enough vitamin A to her fetus to build stores during the last months of pregnancy, and will also have insufficient amounts of vitamin A in her breast milk, resulting in a high risk for vitamin A deficiency in her newborn infant. The World Health Organization (WHO) has implemented several strategies to fight vitamin A deficiency in mothers and children. One of these is to give women after delivery a high dose vitamin A supplement, to improve vitamin A status of mother and, via breast milk, her infant. Surprisingly however, several recent studies investigating the effect of a high dose vitamin A supplement for mothers directly after birth found no effect on vitamin A status in infants 6 months of age. In contrast, earlier studies in Bangladesh and Indonesia, in which women received a high dose vitamin A supplement somewhere in the first 6 weeks after delivery, reported a large impact on vitamin A status in the infants at 6 mo of age. The WHO recommendation on post-partum vitamin A supplementation was based on these earlier studies from Bangladesh and Indonesia. The more recent studies suggest however that this intervention is not effective, and that millions of women currently receive a high dose vitamin A supplement without clear benefits for vitamin A status in either the women or their children.