Mothers’ breastfeeding techniques and its correlation to their infants’ nutritional status: a study in a rural area

Abstract

Introduction: Proper breastfeeding techniques are important for adequate breastmilk supply. The study aimed to capture the mothers’ breastfeeding techniques in rural area and to find out the correlation on their infants’ nutritional status. Materials and Methods: This research used 107 mothers with infants aged 0-6 months that collected using observation sheets. The Spearman-Rho test used to analyze the relationship between the breastfeeding technique and the infants’ nutritional status. Results: Most of the respondents were mothers aged 26 to 35 years with high school-level education and daily lives as housewives. Most of the infants were 3 months old, female (57.9%), and some of them were thin (23.3%), fat (8.4%), stunted (14%), and microcephaly (31.8%). Additionally, most mothers had an inappropriate breastfeeding technique (60.7%) and there was no correlation with the nutritional status of their infants aged 0-6 months (ρ > 0.05). Conclusion: Although there may other factor related to nutritional status, these findings require health workers to pay more attention in rural areas by providing effective education strategies on proper breastfeeding techniques to meet the optimal nutritional need of the infants.

Keywords

• Breastfeeding
• infant
• mothers
• nutritional status