Pola Asuhan Makan dan Kesehatan Anak Balita pada Keluarga Wanita Pemetik Teh di Kebun Malabar PTPN VIII

Abstract

Nutritional status of children under five is significantly affected by food consumption and health. Engle, Menon & Haddad (1996) pointed out that children’s consumption and health is affected by three factors that were parenting, household’s food security and healthy environment. The role of mother is very dominant in taking care and educating the children for growing and development of good and healthy children. General purpose of this research are to analyses: 1) the relation of feeding and health practices, nutritional knowledge tea pickers with their under five children’s nutritional status and health status of under five children with nurtitional status and 2) identify the factors that can affect nutritional status of under five children in Malabar Plantation, PTPN VIII, Banjarsari Village, District of Pangalengan, Bandung Regency, Province of West Java. This cross-sectional design research was conducted within 5 months started from March up to June 2008. Sampling technique was done by cluster method; selected from four plantation sites NHF subject studies. The chosen subject study area was Malabar plantation. Sample taken fulfilled the inclusion criteria that were mother had children ages of 6 up to 60 months at the time of research period, the mother was the tea picker Malabar Plantation, the mother was willing to be interviewed. There were 87 tea picker women as respondent sample based on those determined criteria. The primary data that used in this research are feeding and health practice, nutritional and health knowledge, nutritional status, health status and food consumption. Secondary data that used in this research has been taken from NHF’s research which titled “Study of plantation women workers: sosio economic status, family strength, food consumption, children growth and development (Sunarti & Roosita 2008) The result showed the association between feeding and the health practice of tea picker women with nutritional status of children under five index of WAZ (r = 0.253; P < 0.05). This condition implied that the better score of feeding and health practice, the better nutritional status of the children. The health status of children under five had negative association to their nutritional status (r = - 0.710; P < 0.01). This was meant that the longer the children under five suffer from illness, the worse their nutritional status. The research highlight the important influence factor on nutritional status of children under five was the level of energy and the period of the children suffer from infection such as respiratory tract infection and diarrhea. This was meant that the longer the children under 5 years old suffer from illness, their nutritional status become worse.