Association of Maternal Nutrition Literacy with Feeding Practices and Nutritional Status among Preschool Children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62872/jn.v3i2.638Keywords:
feeding practices, maternal nutrition literacy, nutritional status, preschool children, responsive feedingAbstract
Maternal nutrition literacy may influence how mothers select, prepare, and provide food for young children, thereby shaping feeding practices and potentially contributing to children's nutritional status. This study was designed to examine the association of maternal nutrition literacy with feeding practices and nutritional status among preschool children. A cross-sectional analytical framework was developed for mother-child pairs with children aged 3-5 years. Maternal nutrition literacy was assessed across functional, interactive, and critical dimensions, while feeding practices included responsive feeding, restriction, pressure to eat, and monitoring. Child nutritional status was assessed using anthropometric indices based on World Health Organization growth standards. Because actual field data were not provided, the Results section of this manuscript uses an explicitly synthetic dataset of 240 mother-child pairs solely to demonstrate the proposed statistical analysis and manuscript structure. In the synthetic analysis, higher maternal nutrition literacy was associated with more responsive feeding practices and lower use of pressure-to-eat practices. Children of mothers with higher nutrition literacy also showed a more favorable distribution of anthropometric status; however, these numerical findings are illustrative and cannot be interpreted as empirical evidence. The proposed framework supports further field research using validated nutrition-literacy and feeding-practice instruments, standardized anthropometry, and multivariable analysis to clarify how maternal nutrition literacy relates to preschool feeding and nutritional status
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