Assessment of Mothers Knowledge Regarding the Developmental Milestone among Children Under Two Years in Iraq

Abstract

Assessing a child's growth through the observation of his/her developmental milestone requires a team effort, in which family plays an important role. To assess the knowledge of the Iraqi mothers regarding their children's developmental milestones of their children and to find out if there was any association between this knowledge and certain demographic variables. A cross sectional study, that extended for one year period with sample size of 400 mothers attending six primary health care centers in Baghadad for maternal and child health care. Data were obtained by using a questionnaire derived from the (developmental checklists birth to five 2012), it was composed of four domains of knowledge (motor, cognitive, language and social) in addition to the demographic information of the participated mothers. The data were then analyzed by SPSS version 22; Pearson`s chi square test was used to used to detect the significance of association between categorical data accordingly and the mother's knowledge in each domain and every socio-demographic variable (p value ≤0.05 was regarded significant). Regarding the age of the mothers, the majority were between 20-29 years old (40.5%), 70% of them were employed and the illiterate mothers constituted (30.25%) of the study sample. Most of the mothers (71.5%) stated that their experience was their main source of information. There was a significant association was observed between the mothers age and all four domains of knowledge, other variables (education level, source of information, employment, Number of children, Residence of family) showed different levels of association and most of the mothers had a limited knowledge regarding the cognitive domain.

Parental Knowledge of Children’s Developmental Milestones in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

“…Four-fifths of the participants received a “poor” score on the overall assessment, as they answered less than 40% of the total questions correctly. It is interesting to note that a similar level of knowledge was reported among Albertan adults [ 8 ], while higher scores were reported among other Arab populations [ 7 , 13 ]. Such differences in results could be related to a variety of reasons.…”

“…Most of the existing studies about normal child development focus mainly on mothers [ 4 , 7 , 11 , 13 , 14 ]. In our study, we tried to identify the knowledge gaps of both parents, and we found that mothers are twice as knowledgeable as fathers, which could be related to more frequent contact with their children [ 16 ]; similar gender-related findings were reported in the literature among Western populations [ 4 , 8 ].…”

“…In our study, we were unable to identify any significant association between education level and parental awareness of child development; a similar lack of association was mentioned in the Albertan study [ 8 ]. However, previous regional reports among other Middle Eastern and Arabian Gulf countries have suggested that maternal education could be a predictor of good maternal knowledge of developmental milestones [ 7 , 13 , 14 ]. Reasons behind these inconsistent results include the differences of sample sizes, studied populations, study designs, and others.…”

“…Public health education programs need to know a targeted population's baseline level of knowledge about children's developmental milestones to be able to apply an appropriate interventional approach that will result in maximum outreach [ 11 , 12 ]. In Arabic literature, few studies have been conducted to measure parental knowledge of developmental milestones [ 7 , 13 , 14 ]. In Saudi Arabia, little has been reported about parental knowledge of developmental milestones, with only one study revealing pediatricians noticing a gap between maternal knowledge and children's health issues [ 15 ].…”

How aware are mothers about early childhood developmental milestones? A cross-sectional study at a maternity hospital in rural South India

“…In our study, though there was no link between the number of children and maternal awareness of ECDM, probably because women in our study had only one or two children, we did, however, finwd a significant association with increasing years of formal education. This was also found in a similar study across different sociocultural settings; in villages of Kanchipuram district, Tamil Nadu [22], and among Saudi mothers in the Middle East [23] as well as areas of conflict like Iraq [24]. It can be expected that a mother with better knowledge regarding development would interact and stimulate the child more to improve the developmental outcome of her child [25,26].…”