Nurturing the Future: Complementary Feeding Practices in India

Optimal infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices are key in helping children reach their potential during infancy and early childhood.Inappropriate complementary feeding may impact on physical, emotional, and mental development of infants' lives.Delayed complementary feeding thereby results in poor health outcomes in children and later life as well.This review article aimed to elucidate the factors, challenges, and practices affecting complementary feeding practices.This article also through the light on strategies that may affect complementary feeding practices at the individual and community level.A literature review of published publications was carried out through various search engine platforms, namely Research Gate, Google Scholar, SCOPUS, and government websites databases, which were searched as part of an evaluation of the literature of published publications.Data were collected in different steps, firstly by the identification of research questions, followed by the selection of articles from the literature using specific keywords and lastly by summarizing information from collected data.Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) 2024 guidelines also have focused on complementary feeding.There are many factors that affect children's growth and development, and complementary feeding is one of the important steps of growth in an infant's life.National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 data also indicate the complementary feeding practices in India, which have reduced from the past 15 years from NFHS-3 to NFHS-5.Some strategies can be adopted to improve complementary feeding practices and can be implemented at the individual and community levels.