Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Completed
Study Type: Interventional
Official Title: Integrating Infant Feeding Counselling With Psychosocial Stimulation
Brief Summary: Undernutrition and poor cognitive development affect many children under 5 in developing countries, who are exposed to multiple risk factors including poverty, malnutrition, poor health, and unstimulating home environments. The optimum development and growth of young children requires affection and responsiveness from the mother/caregiver, cognitive stimulation, good nutrition and infection control. In Bangladesh, stimulation at home is generally poor and contributes to children's poorer development. It is important to show that psychosocial stimulation programmes through home visits integrated into the feeding programmes can benefit children's growth and development. This study will help to fill this evidence gap about effective interventions to improve infant and young child growth and development in Bangladesh. Considering the high prevalence of undernutrition and low prevalence of stimulating environments in Bangladesh, it is important to show evidence that integrating infant feeding counselling and psychosocial stimulation activities result in optimum child growth & development. To determine if combined infant feeding counselling and psychosocial stimulation programme (promoting mothers positive parenting) starting in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy, further improves: children's cognitive, motor and language development along with growth and mothers' child rearing and child-feeding knowledge and practices compared to peer counselling alone or usual health messages only. We used a community-based CRCT to examine the impact of a peer counselling infant feeding education program with psychosocial stimulation starting in the third trimester of pregnancy to one year after delivery, to improve child growth and cognition, language, behaviour and psychomotor development compared to a control group receiving usual health messages. The outcome assessments were made on a cohort of infant-mother dyads measured at baseline and at follow up visits. Outcome assessments wer