"Effect of Breastfeeding Practices on Psychomotor Development of Infants"

Abstract

Young children must rapidly develop, grow, and reach significant milestones from birth to three in order to lay the groundwork for future development. One area of newborn and toddler development is psychomotor development. According to the WHO, inadequate nursing practices are linked to severe undernutrition in young children, as well as to poor weight gain and stunted growth. In view of this, a differential design was conducted with an objective to study the "Effect of breastfeeding practices on psychomotor development of infants" in the year 2015-17. The population of the study consisted of 180 mother-infant dyads, where the infants were in the age group of 3 to 24 months and their mothers from rural as well as urban area of northern Karnataka, India. The tools used for the study were SES scale developed by Aggarwal, et al. [1] and a self-structured questionnaire to document the feeding practices, patterns, maternal and child health indicators, BSID-3 (Bayley's Scale of Infant Development -III, 2006 to assess psychomotor development, anthropometric tools and WHO growth indicator charts to assess the physical growth. It was observed that majority (84.50%) of the exclusively breastfed children (for first six months) had average motor ability, followed by high (13.10%) and low (2.40%) motor ability. With respect to complementarily breastfeeding practices, majority (76.40%) were having average motor ability, followed by low (20.80%) and high (2.80%) motor ability. Regarding never breastfed infants, majority (66.70%) were in average motor ability category, followed by low (33.30%) and none of them were in high category significant difference was observed between all the three breastfeeding categories with respect to motor development where exclusively breastfed infants were better on motor abilities compared to complementarily breast-fed infants. Home environment was found to be the most important predicting factor of motor development.