Over the years, national and sub-national governments have introduced several initiatives to improve access to maternal and child health services in India. However, financial barriers have posed major constraints. Based upon the data of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) round 4 for Odisha state, our paper examines the out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE) borne by households for accessing materna...

BACKGROUND Observational epidemiological studies and a systematic review have consistently shown an association between maternal exposure to biomass smoke and reduced birth weight. Our aim was to further test this hypothesis. METHODS We analysed the data from 47,139 most recent singleton births during preceding five years of 2005-06 India Demographic Health Survey (DHS). Information about bir...

Table of contents 1. Main findings 2. Summary 3. Background 4. Infant and perinatal mortality rates 5. Linking birth and death records 6. Cause of infant deaths 7. Age of mother at birth 8. Birthweight 9. Socio-economic status 10. Mother's country of birth 11. Child mortality rates 12. Singleton and multiple births using the 2011 Birth cohort tables 13. Users and uses of infant mortality statis...

BACKGROUND The influence of maternal child-feeding style upon child weight and eating style for children over the age of twelve months is well established. However there is little empirical evidence examining maternal child-feeding style during milk feeding despite evidence that mothers who breastfeed exert lower levels of control over later diet. The aim of this paper was to examine variation ...

PURPOSE To investigate the association among types of breastfeeding, presence of child development risk, socioeconomic and obstetric variables. METHODS The sample was composed of 182 mother-child dyades. Data were collected through an initial interview about breastfeeding; obstetric, socioeconomic, demographic and psychosocial aspects; and mother-child interaction analysis by the Child Develo...

Human child survival depends on adult investment, typically from parents. However, in spite of recent research advances on kin influence and birth order effects on human infant and child mortality, studies that directly examine the interaction of kin context and birth order on sibling differences in child mortality are still rare. Our study supplements this literature with new findings from lar...

Guided by attachment theory, this research investigated connections between avoidant attachment styles and the experience of parenting after the birth of a couple's first child. One hundred and six couples completed a battery of measures approximately 6 weeks before and 6 months after the birth of their first child. As anticipated, parents with more avoidant attachment styles experienced greate...

Given the intrinsically sequential nature of child birth, timing of a child’s birth has consequences not only for itself, but also for the older and younger siblings. The paper thus argues that prior and posterior spacing between consecutive siblings are important measures of the intensity of competition among siblings for limited parental resources. While the available estimates of child morta...