Teen marriage and feeding behaviour to children in Indonesia

Abstract

One of the key determinants of child nutritional status during the critical window period (the first thousand days of life) is feeding practices, including exclusive breastfeeding, continued breastfeeding, and complementary feeding. The condition of mother, as the main child caretaker, will determine the child's nutritional status and nutrition patterns. This research will focus on the effect of teen marriage age, which will be predicted through education, on infant and young child feeding behaviour. Previous studies mainly focussed on only one type of child feeding, but this study discusses three types of child feeding behaviour. This study uses the Indonesian Demographic and Health Survey data in 2012 and the method of analysis is binary logistic regression. The sample for this study is based on 4,177 married women from age 15 to 49 who currently has a first child aged 0 to 23 months. The result shows that mothers who married early and with lowest education attainment have a better behaviour of exclusive and continued breastfeeding, but the worst on complementary feeding.