Caregivers’ feeding style & its relationship with nutritional status of preschool children in a rural area of West Bengal: A cross sectional study

Background: Nutritional status of under-five children is dependent on various factors of which caregivers feeding technique is one of the major contributor. Responsive feeding in accordance to child’s hunger cues with proper involvement of the caregivers can be an important factor in maintaining adequate growth and development of a child. Methods: A cross sectional study had been conducted to assess the different feeding practices of the caregivers, nutritional status of 2-5years old children and the relationship of feeding styles and other relevant factors with malnutrition in Diara village among 102 child–caregiver dyad included in the study by complete enumeration method. The caregivers were interviewed after taking informed consent with the help of a predesigned pretested schedule. Nutritional status of the children was assessed using WHO ANTHRO software version 3.2.2. BMI had been calculated for every caregiver. Data were entered and analyzed by SPSS 20.0 software. Results: The commonest feeding style was authoritative (47.1%), followed by uninvolved (44.1%), indulgent (5.9%) and authoritarian type (2.9%). Overall malnutrition among the children was 42.2%. Multivariate analyses revealed malnutrition to be highly predominant in female child, when caregivers’ education was low with BMI outside normal range and in case of indulgent and uninvolved feeding styles. Conclusion: The study showed a positive association of caregivers’ feeding techniques and nutritional status of the children in the study village. Further researches in large settings are the need of the hour to highlight this issue.