Department of Public Health, La Trobe University, Office: Room 410; Health Sciences Building 2, Melbourne, VIC, 3086, Australia.
BMC Public Health. 2023 Jul 7;23(1):1310. doi: 10.1186/s12889-023-16137-1.
Mass media can play critical roles in influencing parents' attitudes and practice toward the healthy upbringing of children. OBJECTIVE: This study examined the association between the use of five types of mass media among mothers living in rural and urban areas and the early childhood development (ECD) of their children.
We analysed nationally representative and internationally standardized Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey data collected in 2013 and 2019 in Bangladesh. The ECD was calculated using four domains of development: physical health, literacy-numeracy, learning and social-emotional. Mothers' use of newspapers/magazines, radio, television, internet and mobile phones was the study factor. We used Poisson regression with robust variance. The dataset included 27,091 children aged three or four years.
Almost 21% of the children were living in urban and 78% in rural areas. Mothers/caretakers of 30% of the children used none, 39% used one, 25% used two, and approximately 6% used three or more of the five types of media. Mobile phones and television were the dominant types of media, both in terms of the number of users and the frequency of use. Overall, 68.87% of the children were on track in terms of their ECD and 31.13% were not. A significantly larger proportion of urban children (74.23%) than rural children (67.47%) were on track in their ECD. The prevalence of children being on track of ECD increases by 4% (aPR 1.04; 95%CI: 1.01-1.06) for each additional media use among women who lived in urban areas and increases by 7% if women live in rural areas. In terms of the individual formats of media, using newspapers, television and internet was found to be significantly associated with the children in rural areas being on track in terms of their ECD. In the urban sample, only radio use was found to be significant.
Targeted and well-designed child development campaigns that are delivered through popular media types are likely to help mothers to take better care of their children.
大众媒体在影响父母对儿童健康成长的态度和实践方面可以发挥关键作用。
本研究调查了生活在农村和城市地区的母亲使用五种类型的大众媒体与儿童早期发展（ECD）之间的关联。
我们分析了 2013 年和 2019 年在孟加拉国收集的具有全国代表性和国际标准化的多指标类集调查数据。ECD 使用四个发展领域来计算：身体健康、读写算、学习和社会情感。母亲使用报纸/杂志、广播、电视、互联网和手机是研究因素。我们使用具有稳健方差的泊松回归。该数据集包括 27091 名三岁或四岁的儿童。
近 21%的儿童居住在城市，78%居住在农村。30%的儿童的母亲/照顾者不使用任何媒体，39%使用一种媒体，25%使用两种媒体，约 6%使用五种媒体中的三种或更多种。手机和电视是最常用的两种媒体，无论是用户数量还是使用频率都是如此。总体而言，68.87%的儿童在 ECD 方面表现良好，31.13%的儿童表现不佳。在 ECD 方面，城市儿童（74.23%）明显比农村儿童（67.47%）表现更好。在城市地区，女性每增加一种媒体使用，儿童 ECD 表现良好的比例增加 4%（aPR 1.04；95%CI：1.01-1.06）；如果女性居住在农村地区，这一比例增加 7%。就媒体的个别形式而言，在农村地区，使用报纸、电视和互联网与儿童 ECD 表现良好显著相关。在城市样本中，只有使用广播与儿童 ECD 表现良好显著相关。
通过流行媒体类型开展有针对性和精心设计的儿童发展活动，可能有助于母亲更好地照顾子女。
