Parental Nutrition Knowledge, Iron Deficiency, and Child Anaemia in Rural China

Abstract

Anaemia is a factor that could affect health and school performance of students and shed a shadow on poverty in the long-run, particularly in rural China. In response, the current literature mainly pays attention to the effect of direct payments such as money and food. Although some literature indicates that a key to children’s nutritional improvement is to increase their parents’ nutrition knowledge, it has not been well studied. The main purpose of this paper is to test whether nutrition knowledge training for parents can significantly decrease anaemia in their children. This article uses a randomised control trial of information intervention for parents of more than 2000 fourth and fifth grade students in 42 randomly selected rural primary schools in northwest China and confirms that parental nutrition knowledge training has a positive effect on students’ haemoglobin level, through the channel of knowledge improvement and dietary change. Specifically, the programme could reduce children’s anaemia by 6.1 per cent in probability, and increase haemoglobin values by 2.8 on average.