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Effects of parental stature on child stunting in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2021

Amrita Gupta Open the ORCID record for Amrita Gupta [Opens in a new window] ,
John Cleland  and
T. V. Sekher
Amrita Gupta*
Affiliation:
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India
John Cleland
Affiliation:
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK
T. V. Sekher
Affiliation:
International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India
*
*Corresponding author. Email: amritagupta7@gmail.com
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Abstract

Adult heights in India are short. Child stunting remains high though the prevalence fell from 48% to 38% in the decade prior to 2016. This study assesses the links between parental height and child stunting using nationally representative data on 28,975 under-five-year-old children from the 2015–16 National Family Health Survey. Parental heights are represented as quintiles. Logistic regression was applied to estimate the effect of parental heights after adjustment for household wealth, parental schooling, place of residence and other covariates. The unadjusted estimates showed the effect on stunting to be similar for maternal height, wealth and education. In the multivariate analysis maternal height emerged as the strongest predictor of stunting, with adjusted odds of 2.85 for the shortest compared with the tallest quintile. The two other strong predictors of stunting were paternal height and wealth, with adjusted odds of close to 2.0 for the lowest quintile relative to the highest quintiles. In comparison, associations between stunting and other factors were minor, with the partial exception of mother’s education. The findings underscore the key role of intergenerational influences on stunting. Maternal height has a stronger association with childhood stunting than paternal height and socioeconomic influences such as education and household wealth. The influence of paternal height is also strong, equal in magnitude to household wealth. Health workers need to be alerted to the special needs of short women.

Keywords

Child stuntingParental heightsIntergenerational effects
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , July 2022 , pp. 605 - 616
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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