Empowering mothers through mentoring on 6-60 months children’s nutrition care: An effort to prevent child malnutrition

Abstract

The prevalence of malnutrition in Indonesia in the last 20 years remains high. This shows that management through curative aspects is not enough. A new strategy is needed to solve the problem as well as to overcome the risk factors. The root cause of malnutrition in Indonesia is the lack of maternal knowledge and power towards their nutrition status. This study aims to determine the mentoring that To do through a tutorial module on malnutrition risk factors. This expects to empower mothers on caring for 6-60 months old children. This research is a two-sample experimental study with controls. Respondents were mothers who had children aged 6-60 months. A total of 39 mothers choose a control group and 38 mothers as a treatment group. The mentoring method was given to the treatment group while providing counseling to the control group: multivariate ANOVA and independent t-tests to show maternal empowerment. Mentoring on caregiving was very effective in increasing mothers’ abilities to care for their children’s nutrition (p <0.05). Hence, the mentoring method could empower mothers to care for their children (p = 0.005). It took six months to empower 13.2% of mothers with a minimum knowledge score of 2.5 and practice of 3.1 times, respectively, much higher than the counseling method. Mothers who are already empowering will be aware of any deviation in their children’s nutritional status.