A Study on the Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice (KAP) in Iranian Mothers toward Communication, Language, Speech and Swallowing Development of 18-to-36-month-old Children

Objectives: Parent-child interaction has a great impact on the early years of a child's life. A Parent's knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) toward a parent's responsibilities and a child's developmental norms can influence the quality of a child's development. Examining this issue is the purpose of this study. Methods: This study had two phases, the first phase of which was instrument design and the second phase was descriptive-analytical and cross-sectional. The researcher-designed questionnaire was completed by 280 mothers who had 18-36-month-old children with typically developing. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, available sampling and snowball sampling was done in person or online. 28 mothers completed the same questionnaire again two weeks later to obtain the reliability of the test-retest. The data were analysed with version 22 of SPSS software. This analysis was performed through a correlation between variables and multivariate linear regression. Results: The results showed that the mother's KAP about children's development was high (75, 64.13 and 62.78% of the answers were correct, respectively). Parents' knowledge had significant but weak correlation with attitude (P = 0.05 and r = 0.116). But there was a strong relationship between parent's attitude and practice (P = 0.001 and r = 0.506). Mother's age had a small but positive and significant relationship with knowledge (P = 0.04 and B = 0.082). Most of the mothers obtained their information about child development from family, friends, and paediatricians. Discussion: It seems that older mothers may have more knowledge about child development and the mother's appropriate attitude result in good practice towards child development. It is necessary to improve and update the available sources of child development for mothers.