“Feeding Your Baby”, A Community Effort to Promote Healthy Infant Feeding Practices

Abstract

LEARNING OUTCOME: To produce a culturally appropriate educational tool in English and Spanish that will assist young parents in properly feeding and caring for a new infant. Although a wide variety of infant feeding material is available, much of it does not meet the needs of minority and non-English speaking families. Currently available materials were presented to focus groups of primarily African-American and Latino mothers and fathers to determine their responses. The findings were used to develop a culturally sensitive educational tool with a reading level of approximately fifth grade that meets the nutritional recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics. A broad-based professional advisory committee helped to shape the theme. The resultant booklet is an illustrated story about a young family with a new baby. The story takes the family through the baby's first year. It takes a positive approach on breastfeeding including answers to questions that fathers ask. The maternal grandmother also has a supportive but sometimes contradictory role. After introduction of the first booklet, a similar process was undertaken to meet the needs of the very diverse Philadelphia Latino community. Different characters and themes were developed to present the same message in a culturally appropriate manner. After the booklets’ introductions, training sessions were provided for public health and community workers to enable them to make the best use of the booklet with their clients.