The Effect of Educational Intervention on the Promotion of Health Literacy of Mothers in the Field of Child Nutrition

Childhood is the most important period of a child's growth and development. Considering the role of the mother, this age period is important due to the formation of eating habits and the start of complementary feeding. The purpose of this research is to determine the effect of education on improving the health literacy of mothers in the field of child nutrition.

The current research is a semi-experimental before-and-after study that was conducted on 696 mothers covered by the health center of Pakdasht city in 2017. The samples were randomly selected in two groups of 50 case and 50 control group. The tool for collecting information is the parents' health literacy questionnaire and the food pyramid scale, which were completed by mothers two times before and 3 months after the intervention. After the pre-test, educational intervention was conducted in 8 sessions. SPSS version 22 and Kolmogorov Smirnov, Wilcoxon, linear regression, Mann-Whitney, Fisher, chi-square statistical tests were used for data analysis. It should be noted that the level of significance in the present study is P<0.05.

There is a significant difference between the average knowledge scores of the case and control groups after the training, which shows the effect of the training. Before the intervention, the average scores of the two intervention groups were 37.43, attitude 20.03, and behavior 8.45. The intervention had increased by 40.25, 20.52 and 8.53, respectively.

According to the findings of this study, education can be an effective tool to improve the knowledge, attitude and practice of mothers towards children's nutrition.