Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices among the selected Urban Working Lactating Mother, Bangladesh

Abstract

A cross sectional study was carried out among 120 infant-mother pairs and 80 young child-mother pairs to determine the infant and young children feeding (IYCF) practices and the nutritional status of those attending the Maternal and Child Health Hospital, Dhaka city during July to December 2012. First drop of initiative food is supreme concern in case of exclusive breast-feeding, but after delivery 6% mothers initiated honey as a first drop. Only 16% children were found with history of standard initiation of complementary feeding at six months but in case of 61% children, the age was 4–5 months. However, complementary feeding frequency in case of infant was mostly 5–6 times a day (70.8%) and in case of young child feeding frequency was 7–8 times (75.0%). A very common traditional weaning festival called “MukheBhat” ceremony celebrated by the family members and relatives and in that occasion Payesh/ kheer was first introduced as first weaning foods. The weight for age, length for age and weight for length (mean±SD) for infants were 81.86±11.69%, 95.77±4.42% and 90.79±8.29% and young children were 83.26±8.71%,  94.48±5.12% and 92.97±6.71%  of NCHS median respectively. The prevalence of severe under-weight, stunted and wasted of all infant aged 0–11 months were 5.8%, 6.7% and 1.7% respectively and of all children aged 12–23 months were 4.5%, 5.5% and 3.0% respectively.

Keywords: Complementary feeding, Mukh-E-Bhat, Payesh/ Kheer, Working mother, IYCF, Bangladesh