The aim of this study was to investigate the necessities of supporting both mother and child for improving children’s feeding development.
Methods:
The subject was 576 parents aged from 20’s to 60’s who had the baby living in Tokyo metropolitan, and Chiba, Yamanashi and Okinawa prefectures. We have surveyed about the needs of parents of children with feeding difficulties with a questionnaire for feeding and the Nakajima’s childcare burden scale. Correlations between the items were statistically analyzed by the chi-squared test using Windows SPSS Ver. 18 Statistical significance was accepted as p < 0.05. Before starting measurements, the purpose and the protocol were explained to the subjects in order to obtain their consent.
Results:
The age of parents’ group was mostly 30’s. Most of family forms was so called “ nuclear family”. Most person engaging childcare was mothers. Three hundred forty-eight subjects had distress about child’s feeding. For feeding methods, 289 were breast and artificial feeding, and 185 were only breast feeding. The 82 subject had experienced weaning difficulty. We have analyzed the relationship between the experiment of weaning difficulty from breast or bottle and the eight items of parents’ childcare burden. There were significant relationships among the weaning difficulty, and feeling of comfortlessness (p = 0.048), feeling the burden of childcare (p = 0.025), feeling no privacy (p = 0.001) and interfering with functioning (p = 0.0001). Moreover, when the subject felt distress for child’s feeding, there was significantly related to all items of the childcare burden (p<0.05).
Conclusions:
This study suggested that feeding therapy during weaning period is necessary for reducing the parents’ burden of childcare.
Acknowledgment
This study was supported in part by a Research Grant for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (Grant # 23593106).