Reframing maternal and child health nutrition

What we eat and the quality of the food we eat has less to do with our weight and body shape and more to do with our brain development and future economic productivity. What we eat during pregnancy affects our children’s health and future wellbeing. If we eat poorly and drink alcohol, our children will be less than optimal, tending towards poor health, with a higher risk of dying. If our children die, rather than being born smaller and sicker, there is a lower economic impact on household resources, public service resources and future country economics.

The long shadow of poor nutrition

Smaller, sicker and less than optimal birth outcomes cast a long shadow across individual life courses and lifespans. If you are born with a low birthweight, less than 2.5kg at full term, then your risk of being too short and too fat is twice as high as that of a healthier baby. Then, as a young child growing and learning, your chances of being developmentally slow or delayed are higher, your learning is less and deficient. Then your progress and the requirements to achieve healthy milestones demand more resources: more time and more money for professional help to get you on par with your healthier peers. Putting pressure and constraints on your family. Not to mention the uncalculated cost of shame and resentment of your parents and family. Despite efforts to be inclusive and accommodating, parents with special needs and developmentally delayed children carry additional costs of painful parenting. This happens as early as when we start to explore: Can he sit yet? No! He is slow. Does he have teeth yet? No! He is slower, and so it goes, even up to school grades and access to university.

The unseen costs

You see, the burden of healthy babies is on mothers and their health and their life choices, and even on the health of their partners. Mating with a less-than-healthy partner affects your child’s health outcomes. Making poor decisions like smoking or drinking alcohol affects your child’s future health outcomes. What you choose to feed your child, how you feed your child and how often you feed your child all influence what your child’s relationship with food is, how your child engages with food and what value your child places on food: good quality fruit vs generous servings of ice cream, all affect your child’s experience through you and with you.

This is not to shame mothers or to burden them, but mothers are the first example and teachers. We do as we see, we reflect what we know and when we know we need to do better. With all the wealth of information and access to extensive resources, why are our children in worse health today than 10 or even 20 years ago? Childhood obesity has increased almost fourfold for children under the age of 12 months. Young children don’t choose foods. They eat what their moms feed them. Children’s health reflects the quality of food they are fed. If children are fatter than ever, then the foods they are fed are more fattening. It’s logical. Also children are twice as likely to be overweight if their parents are overweight. With more than 60% of women being overweight or obese, the odds are against the children.

Maternal nutrition: A driver of child nutrition

So, maternal nutrition has to be positioned as a driver of poor child nutrition. In South Africa, sadly, that’s overwhelmingly in favour of unhealthy overweight in children. Mothers, guard your children’s futures. If health is wealth, then we are raising a generation of indebted children. Please improve your nutrition so that you improve your child’s future prospects. You are the wealth creator of your family. When you do better, so will our children. And what your children learn from you, they will repeat with their children, poor nutrition in both biological and sociological aspects.

When we know better, we do better. Here’s to better health. Please start today, for the sake of your children. Children deserve the best of you and their futures.