Complementary feeding practices and associated factors among children aged 6–23 months in Pakistan

Abstract

Premature mortality and undernutrition rates in Pakistan are among the highest in the world. Inadequate infant and young child feeding are the major causes of premature mortality and undernutrition. Yet, very little is known about the determinants of complementary feeding practices in Pakistan. Therefore, this study aims to identify the determinants of inadequate complementary feeding practices among children aged 6 to 23 months in Pakistan by using the latest nationally representative data from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (2017–18). The results show that only 12% of children consume a minimum acceptable diet, 21% achieve minimum dietary diversity, and 38% reach minimum meal frequency. Multivariate regression analysis shows that child age, child weight at birth, mother’s access to newspapers/magazines at the individual level, wealth at the household level, and prenatal visits at the community level are significant predictors of complementary feeding practices among children aged 6–23 months in Pakistan. These findings show that, in addition to poverty alleviation, raising awareness through health practitioners, increasing access to media, and expanding access to child and maternal healthcare can improve complementary feeding practices in Pakistan. This consequently reduces premature mortality and undernutrition.

Between and Within-Country Variations in Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices in South Asia

“…In addition, we found lower complementary feeding among mothers with no formal education or below secondary education. This finding is consistent with a Pakistani study [ 51 ]. The low rate of complementary feeding among mothers with no formal education or below-secondary educated mothers could be explained by their lack of knowledge regarding the appropriate time to start and feed diversified complementary foods to their children [ 52 , 53 ].…”

Trends and determinants of minimum dietary diversity among children aged 6–23 months: a pooled analysis of Indonesia Demographic and Health Surveys from 2007 to 2017

“…We set the P-value cut-off higher to allow the inclusion of more potentially critical variables in the model. However, we set the survey year, child's sex and parental covariates, such as mother's age (24)(25)(26) , mother's occupation (24,26,27) , mother's decision-making (25,27) , mother's access to media (26,28) and father's education (24,26) as fixed variables in the multivariate analysis regardless of their significance. We removed the least important variables one by one using a manual backward elimination beginning with the full model.…”

Prevalence and predictors of appropriate complementary feeding practice among mothers with children 6–23 months in Northern Ghana

“…Poor complementary feeding practices are associated with many factors including cultural traditional barriers, maternal education, wealth index, child's age, exposure to media, ANC attendance, postnatal check-up, maternal occupation, institutional delivery, and geographical region (Ali, Arif, and Shah 2021;Epheson et al 2018;Guldan et al 2000;Kassa et al 2016;Samuel and Ibidapo 2020;Wang, Wang, and Shi 2000;WHO and UNICEF 2021).…”