"Using Baby Books To Increase Knowledge, Improve Maternal Attitudes, Beliefs, and Practices, and Promote Child Health"
Assistant Professor Stephanie Reich presented a poster at the Pediatric Academic Societies Conference in Denver on April 30 through May 3. Her presentation was entitled: Using Baby Books To Increase Knowledge, Improve Maternal Attitudes, Beliefs, and Practices, and Promote Child Health. The 2011 conference theme was "Public Health and Prevention". Dr. Reich's research interests include Socio-Emotional Development, Parent-Child Interactions, and Peer Networks.
Summary of Poster Presentation
Background: While parent education has been a highly promoted mechanism for increasing the health and well-being of young children, little research has explored the efficacy of parent education mechanisms or how changes in knowledge relate to child and maternal health.
Objective: To test whether embedding educational information into baby books is an effective and low-cost way to increase maternal knowledge of children's development, improve the quality of maternal-child interactions, and promote maternal and child health.
Design/Methods: Using a 3-group randomized design, this project embedded anticipatory guidance information into baby books to teach new mothers about child development and injury prevention. Primiparious women were assigned to: (1) educational book group receiving baby books with educational information during pregnancy and when their child was 2, 4, 6, 9, and 12 months old, (2) noneducational book group receiving books with the same illustrations but non-educational text on the same schedule, or (3) no-book group. Home-based data collection occurred during pregnancy and when children were 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, and 18 months. Data collection and experimenter contact were equivalent between all 3 groups.
Results: The books were effective in increasing maternal knowledge of anticipatory guidance (ES = 0.3) and changing specific safety practices (ES range 0.13-0.3). The intervention also changed parenting attitudes, with less support of corporal punishment (ES range 0.3-0.7), more positive beliefs about reading (ES =0.32), a greater sense of parenting self-efficacy (ES = 0.2), better nutritional practices (ES = 0.4), and a reduction in mothers' depressive symptoms (ES = 0.2) and parenting stress (0.3). Analyses are currently exploring the intervention's impact on the quality of parent-child interactions and children's language and cognitive development.
Conclusions: While the effect sizes are mainly small to medium in size, this study demonstrated that a relatively low-cost and easy to implement intervention can increase maternal knowledge of typical child development, improve maternal attitudes, beliefs, and practices, and perhaps improve child health.
