Breastfeeding awareness and practices among Puncak Alam residents / Ainul Rahmah Abdul Halim

Breastfeeding process is an important natural process to provide infants with nutrients that they need. Knowledge and awareness of breastfeeding process are important for mothers to breastfeed their infants correctly in order to reduce maternal and child sickness rate. There are many programs and initiatives had been done to promote breastfeeding to the society. The community should be exposed and given enough information about breastfeeding so they can practice in proper way. This study assess level of knowledge and awareness towards breastfeeding among Puncak Alam residents as well as their practices of breastfeeding. A cross-sectional study has been conducted among 420 respondents from different races including Malay, Chinese, Indian, and others. In this study, data were analysed using Microsoft Excel and Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17 .0 which include descriptive analysis and Mann Whitney U test. The respondents were female with 45.8 % (n = 179) were 20 to 23 years old, 36.6 % (n = 143) were 31 to 40 years old, and only 17.6 % (n = 69) aged 41 years and above. Among all of them, 91 % were breastfeeding and the other 9 % did not breastfeed. The result showed that there were no significant difference of breastfeeding knowledge and awareness between breastfeeding mothers and non breastfeed mothers and most of them practice breastfeeding in correct way.