Breast feeding practices and its associated factors in the first year of life: a study in part of north India.

Objectives: To study breast feeding practices during first year of life and its relation to maternal and infant characteristics. A Cross-sectional study was conducted among 210 mothers having children in the age group of 12 months and below using 30 clusters sampling technique. Results: 95.7% infants in our study were ever breast fed.Prelacteal feed was given by 77.9% mothers and only 22.9% mothers had started directly with breast milk. Parity and gender was significantly associated however, maternal literacy was found to be insignificantly associated with type of first feed. No significant difference was noted between time of initiation of first breast feed, literacy status, parity and place of delivery. Gender of the child and type of delivery were found to be significantly associated. In our study, the practice of giving colostrum was very high (95%) and was discarded by only 5% of the mothers. 71.1% mothers were able to feed their infants on demand and only 6.5% mothers practiced schedule type of breast feeding. In our study only 12.4% infants were exclusively breast fed, 13.9% were predominantly breast fed and 73.6% were partially breast fed. Only 7.9% infants in the age of 3 to 5 months were exclusively breast fed.In our study, 57.2% mothers got information about breast feeding from their family members, 30.3% from the doctor and 6.4% from the paramedical staff. Conclusions: Study recommends the need of team work of our peripheral health workers (ANM, ASHA, AWW) for continual sensitization of mothers regarding importance of breast milk over artificial feeds. Mothers have to be motivated for exclusively breast feeding their infants for six months.