title: Feeding My Child: How Mothers Experience Nutrition Across the World. A Companion Report to The State of the World’s Children 2019
Creators: name: Schmied, Virginia
name: De Oliveira, Juliano Diniz
name: Fleming, Catharine
name: Hockey, Kaitlyn
name: Lala, Girish
name: Theakstone, Georgina
name: Third, Amanda
Publisher: name: Western Sydney University
Year: 2020

description: The first 1,000 days, from conception to age two, is a critical period for growth and development, and a period when diet quality is more important than at other times of life. However, as The State of the World’s Children 2019: Children, Food and Nutrition reported, malnutrition – in the forms of stunting, wasting and overweight – means that globally one in three children are not growing well.
To address this concern, there is an urgent need to focus on food systems – or the sum of activities and actors involved in producing, processing, distributing, preparing and consuming foods. When it comes to the nutrition of children in their first 1,000 days, the ways in which mothers interact with these complex food systems is vital, reflecting the reality that, globally, mothers continue to carry the primary responsibility for childcare and feeding. Understanding mothers’ experiences in providing food for their children, as well as ensuring a nutritious diet for themselves, is therefore critical to addressing all forms of malnutrition.
It was this thinking that lay behind the planning and implementation of an unprecedented series of international workshops in 2019 as part of the research for UNICEF’s flagship report, The State of the World’s Children
2019: Children, food and nutrition. With the generous support of UNICEF Country Offices and National Committees, 573 mothers from 18 countries participated in workshops designed to gather information in diverse and engaging ways about food and nutrition practices. Mothers worked individually and in facilitated groups to describe what they and their child ate and drank on an average day.
This report is a companion to Children, Food and Nutrition, providing more depth to the information mothers contributed in workshops. Their voices provide further graphic evidence of the challenges far too many families around the world face in feeding their children well. In so many areas – including the use of breastmilk substitutes, the lack of diversity in children’s diets, and the poor quality of mothers’ own diets during pregnancy – families are facing huge nutritional challenges.
For many mothers, particularly in low income countries, cost is the biggest obstacle to feeding their children a diverse diet of healthy foods. Yet in some cases, even where families did have money to buy food, mothers said they could not find the right variety of foods, or that food was of poor quality, or that they could not access food sources because of transport difficulties.
Mothers also said they wanted more information on healthy foods and about how best to manage their children’s preferences.
The challenges outlined by mothers underscore the need for a systems-based approach to improving children’s diets. This requires action in the food system and in other key supportive systems, notably in health, water and sanitation, education and social protection. It is only by such a comprehensive approach that we can meet children’s unique nutritional needs and provide them with the nutritious, safe, affordable and sustainable diets that societies need if they are to meet the economic, social and environmental challenges of the 21st century.