Assessment Of Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices Among Mothers in Rural Madhya Pradesh
Keywords:
Breast feeding, Infant & young child feeding practices, Exclusive breastfeedingAbstract
Introduction: Feeding during early childhood is important for normal physical and mental growth as well as for health in later life. In India, poor feeding practices in early childhood contribute to the burden of malnutrition and infant and child mortality.
Objective: Objective of the study was to assess the Infant and young child feeding practices among the children less than two year of age.
Methods: A community based cross-sectional study was conducted. A total of 300 children less than 24 month of age were studied using a standard pretested & pre-validated questionnaire.
Result: Exclusive breastfeeding was followed by about 84.9% children under 6 month of age. About 64% children were put on breastfeeding within one hour of birth. It was found that 51.1% of infants aged 6-8 months were receive soft, semi-solid or solid foods. However few children aged 6-23 months met the requirements for indicators for Minimum dietary diversity (47.8%), Minimum meal frequency (67.8%) and Minimum acceptable diet (32.8%).
Conclusion: This study showed that although the exclusive breastfeeding rate is satisfactory but there are many inappropriate feeding practices during early childhood. These findings highlight the need for effective national level nutrition programmes to enhance breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices with a focus on the target groups.
References
Bhutta ZA, Ahmed T, Black RE, Cousens S, Dewey K, Giuliani E et al. What works? Interventions for mater-nal and child under nutrition and survival. Lancet 2008; 371:417-40.
Jones G, Steketee RW, Black RE, Bhutta ZA, Morris SS; Bellagio Child Survival Study Group. How many child deaths can we prevent this year? Lancet 2003; 362:65-71.
Registrar General of India. Sample Bulletin, Sample Registration System; 2012.Available from: http://www.pib.nic.in/ (Last accessed on2014 Jan17).
Planning Commission of India. Twelth five year plan (2012-2017). V. 2, Chapter 3. New Delhi: Government of India, 2001:337.
World Health Organization. The optimal duration of exclusive breastfeeding. Report of an Expert Consul-tation. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organiza-tion, 2002.
World Health Organization. Global strategy for infant and young child feeding. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2003.
Pan American Health Organization. Guiding princi-ples for complementary feeding of the breastfed child. Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, World Health Organization, Division of Health Pro-motion and Protection, Food and Nutrition Program, 2001.
India. Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Inte-grated management of neonatal and childhood illness. Training module of health workers. New Delhi: Minis-try of Health and Family Welfare, Government of In-dia, 2003:74-5.
International Institute for Population Sciences. Na-tional family health survey (NFHS 3), 2005-06: India. V. I. Mumbai: International Institute for Population Sciences, 2007. 540 p.
Khan MF,Kayina P,Agrawal P,Gupta A,Kannan AT.A study on infant & young child feeding practices among mothers attending an urban health center in East Delhi.Indian j Public Health 2012;56:301-4.
Indicators for assessing infant & young child feeding practices: Conclusion of a consensus meeting held 6-8 November 2007 in Washington D.C., USA.World Health Organization, 2008. Available from: http://whqlibdoc.who.int /publications/2008/9789241596664_eng.pdf.[Last Accessed on 2014 Jan17].
Govt. of India (2013), Guideline for enhancing opti-mal Infant and Child feeding practices. Ministry of Health and Family Welfare New Delhi. .Available from: http://www.unicef.org/india (Last accessed on17.04.2014).
Sinhababu A,Mukhopadhyay DK, Panja TK, Saren AB,Mandal NK,Biswas AB. Infant- and Young Child-feeding Practices in Bankura District, West Bengal, India.J Health Popul Nutr 2010;28:294-9.
Edmond KM, Kirkwood BR, Amenga-Etegos S, Owusu- Agyei S, Hurt LS. Effect of early infant feed-ing practices on infection-specific neonatal mortality: an investigation of the causal links with observational data from rural Ghana. Am J Clin Nutr 2007; 86:1126-31.
National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3),2005-06:India:vol1.Mumbai:International Institute for Population Sciences and Macro International;2007.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The authors retain the copyright of their article, with first publication rights granted to Medsci Publications.
