Traditional Applications on The Health and Development of Babies

It is known that mothers perform traditional practices about their babies’ health and development. Such practices vary from one city to other and shape in accordance with culture. This situation closely interests many disciplines regarding child development and child health. It is because of the fact that it is regarded important to determine mothers’ practices about their babies’ health and development in order to understand the reason behind the mothers’ practices and guide them about this subject so that they can treat their babies correctly. In the study, it was aimed to determine the traditional practices of mothers to care for their babies, protect them from diseases and to be healthy, and to examine the relationship between traditional practices and age, number of children, education level, working status, living with the spouse's family and sources of information. The study included 230 mothers reached by students studying at Erzincan Binali Yıldırım University, whose family lived in the provinces of the Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia Region. SemiStructured Interview Form developed by the researchers was used as the data collection tool. In the form, there were questions to determine the traditional practices and beliefs, which were used by the mothers for protecting their babies’ health, supporting their babies’ development and curing the diseases, in the cities where students live. When the findings obtained from the study were analyzed, it was determined that the mothers' inclusion of traditional practices in the care of babies varies according to age, number of children and information sources, and the traditional practices of babies in terms of protection and health are different according to their educational background, spouse's family and information sources. In addition, it was determined that mothers included different traditional practices in terms of babies' care, protection from diseases and health. It can be said that the situation of mothers including traditional practices in baby care varies according to various variables and they include different practices.