Counselling mothers and caregivers on child nutrition

In your work, you will have many possibilities for helping parents improve the nutritional status of their children. You should always employ nutrition counselling as a tool to help you achieve this objective.

Nutrition counselling is a process of finding the solution to the child's nutritional problem together with their mother or caregiver. Unlike nutrition education, nutrition counselling is a two-way process during which the mother is actively involved in describing the child's problems as well as participating in analysing the causes and identifying the available resources and solutions.

Working together in this way with the mother or caregiver will help them reach a decision about the doable actions. Analysing causes and identifying actions are an important part of the overall process.

Once you weigh the child and determine their nutritional status you need to share this information with the mother and negotiate with her what actions she can take.

Follow-up is also very important and you should always recommend to the mother that she makes an appointment so you can see whether she has carried the agreed actions or whether she has had some problems with these. This action or counselling stage completes the triple A cycle approach.

Counselling is an important skill, and as you have seen, a key element of the triple A cycle. The GALIDRA steps outlined in the box below will help you to counsel mothers and caregivers effectively.

Counselling using GALIDRA steps is an individually focused BCC strategy that enables you to bring about positive behavioural change. As you can see in the Figure below, the process involves you having repeated contact with a mother or caregiver to make sure that they get to the trial and adoption stages of behaviour change.