IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/adx/jessjr/v4y2023i2p271-282.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Effect of Maternal Employment on Nutritional Status of Children in Faisalabad City

Author

Listed:
  • Ayesha Rouf
  • Tahira Sadaf
  • Muhammad Amjad Iqbal
  • Zaki Rauf
  • Nazia Tabasam

Abstract

For the overall personality development of children, receiving care and attention from their parents is crucial. Mothers play a crucial role in a child's upbringing and nutritional status. Employed women face many challenges in society, including multitasking. They are obliged to balance their job with household responsibilities and childcare. This study analyzed the impact of a mother’s employment status on the nutritional status of children under five years in the district Faisalabad of Punjab Province of Pakistan. The respondents included in this study were between 15-49 years mothers. A multi-stage probability sampling was used, where the first step involved the selection of five towns. In the second step, 218 respondents were selected. Respondents from each town were selected in proportion to the population of the town. A well-structured questionnaire comprising both open and close-ended questions was used to collect data. Children were assessed using anthropometric measures to see if they were underweight, wasted, or stunted and to evaluate a person's weight for height, weight for age, and height for age. Results revealed that children of working mothers had healthy body weight (BMI within the 5th percentile to 85th percentile) compared to mothers who do not work, i.e., 43.1 and 27.5 percent, respectively. Almost one-fifth of working mother’s children were underweight, which is the lowest ratio compared to children of non-working mothers, i.e., 37.6 percent. 6.4 percent of mothers with working children were overweight, which is higher than 2.8 percent of mothers without jobs. Children with working mothers made up 29.4 percent of the population, and children with jobless mothers made up 17.4 percent. Logistic regression was used to analyze the data. A significant association was found between the mother's employment and the nutritional wellbeing of a child. At a 95 percent confidence interval, mother's age was statistically significant (p = 0.028) and its Wald statistics was 4.84 with 1 degree of freedom. The odds ratio, i.e., Exp (B), is 0.935, and regression coefficient B of Mage (Mother Age) is-0.067which reduces the likelihood of children’s nutritional status to 6.5 percent. Duration of breastfeeding (DBF) is significant (p 0.05) at a 95 percent confidence of interval, and its Wald statistics is 16.233 at 1 df. The regression coefficient DBF is 0.137, showing an increase in the nutritional status of children.

Suggested Citation

  • Ayesha Rouf & Tahira Sadaf & Muhammad Amjad Iqbal & Zaki Rauf & Nazia Tabasam, 2023. "Effect of Maternal Employment on Nutritional Status of Children in Faisalabad City," Journal of Education and Social Studies, Science Impact Publishers, vol. 4(2), pages 271-282.
  • Handle: RePEc:adx:jessjr:v:4:y:2023:i:2:p:271-282
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://scienceimpactpub.com/journals/index.php/jess/article/view/601/354
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:adx:jessjr:v:4:y:2023:i:2:p:271-282. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dr. Shahbaz Ahmad (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.scienceimpactpub.com/journals/index.php .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.