Abstract
Breastfeeding self-efficacy is the main part for the success of breastfeeding, achieved by the support from the family and from the community. Self-efficacy is the one’s belief in their capabilities, directly related to behavior, feeling, thoughts and motivation of the person. Successful experience increases mom’s self-efficacy, and leads to better breastfeeding. This is a cognitive theory that assess mom’s self-confidence to breastfeed her baby rather than whether she do succeed to breastfeeding. This paper intended to explore the alternative techniques used to overcome the challenges to exclusive breastfeeding and evaluate breastfeeding self-efficacy of mothers who used alternative techniques. The study is a cross sectional study in Al-Aslogy family health unit, Zagazig city, on women who gave birth to a healthy term baby and initiated breastfeeding in the first seven days postpartum, mothers were interviewed for the Breastfeeding self-efficacy and using alternative techniques for child feeding. This paper revealed that the mean score of Breast-feeding Self-efficacy Scale is 39.93±5.81 in very low social class versus 56.6±13.33 in high social class with high statistically significant difference and the mean score of BFSE-Score is also statistically higher with exclusive breast feeding than in mothers who used alternative techniques (55.35±7.09 versus 40.34±7.81) respectively (p=0.000). It was concluded that Breast-feeding Self-efficacy Score is higher with exclusive breast feeding than with the use of alternative techniques.
Highlights
Breastfeeding is the normal method for nutrition of the baby, all mothers can breastfeed their babies, as long as they receive education and supported from their families, health care provider and society
Breastfeeding is affected by factors as age, level of education, structure of family, socioeconomic status, wanted pregnancy, health problems during pregnancy, previous experience with breastfeeding, the working status of the mother, education about breastfeeding, the provider education about breastfeeding and the type of delivery [2]
About half of the studied lactating females exclusively breast fed their babies without any assistant methods (54.6%) (Table 1)
Summary
Breastfeeding is the normal method for nutrition of the baby, all mothers can breastfeed their babies, as long as they receive education and supported from their families, health care provider and society. Breastfeeding is affected by factors as age, level of education, structure of family, socioeconomic status, wanted pregnancy, health problems during pregnancy, previous experience with breastfeeding, the working status of the mother, education about breastfeeding, the provider education about breastfeeding and the type of delivery [2]. Successful experience increases mom’s self-efficacy and leads to better breastfeeding [4]. It is defined as a mother’s confidence in her ability to breastfeed her new infant [5] and has been positively associated with breastfeeding duration and exclusivity in various cultures and age groups [6, 7]
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