Lately, you as a parent may often hear about "stunting" in children. Yes, stunting is one of the government's focuses on improving the quality of human resources in Indonesia. Many studies have shown that children who grow to stunt carry a lot of harm to themselves. For example, the risk of developing development problems that cannot be changed again has a long impact on the future. Then, can stunting be prevented? When is the best time to prevent stunting children?
What is stunting?
Stunting or short can also be a condition where the child's height is not in accordance with his age. This could indicate that child growth is hampered.
Stunting can be caused by malnutrition for a long time since the child is still in the womb until the child is two years old. This can be caused by poor feeding practices, nutritional insufficiency, and recurrent infectious diseases that can prevent babies from getting the nutrients they need for growth.
What is the effect of stunting?
Stunting can have a negative impact on both long and short periods. This can be influential in the life of the baby in the future, both in terms of health, education, and economics.
Stunting in children can affect the development of the brain. As a result, the performance of children in school can be worse than children who are not stunting. In the future, this may affect the economic life of children. Economists even estimate that stunting can reduce a country's GDP by 12%.
In addition, stunting children generally have a weaker immune system and also have a greater risk of serious diseases, such as diabetes and cancer. The impact of stunting can even be passed on to the next generation. Stunting mothers are at risk of giving birth to babies who are also stunting if their nutritional adequacy is not noticed.
Unfortunately, this stunting condition cannot be corrected. There is a possibility that it can be improved, but this really needs the support of a better new environment. For this reason, it is important for your parents to be able to prevent stunting children.
When is the right time to prevent stunting children?
It is difficult to improve stunting that a child has experienced if the child is more than 2 years old. This is because until the age of two years is a critical period (critical window) or also includes the first 1000 days of life (HPK), where at this time the growth and development of children occur very quickly.
Height is an accumulation. So, if the child is less than two years old, he or she has been stunted, then it is difficult for the child to grow to be as high as a child who is not stunting. Chasing backwardness may not be an impossible thing, but it takes more effort that requires a good environment.
For this reason, it is very important for mothers to pay attention to their nutritional adequacy starting from the period of pregnancy (1000 HPK is counted since pregnant women). This period is the beginning of the growth and development of children. If since the nutrition content of the child is good, then the nutritional status of the child will be good at birth, thus contributing to the growth and development of the next child.
Until two-year-olds, this is a critical period of children in achieving good growth and development. At this time, the growth and development of children occur very quickly, faster than other times even during puberty.
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