Correlates of Children's Nutritional Status in Bangladesh: Does Mothers' Education Matter?

This paper intends to identify the correlates of Bangladeshi children's nutritional status. The primary focus of the paper rests on mothers' education, especially to understand whether different level of mothers' education has varying extent of effect on child nutrition. Data for the empirical analysis of this paper are obtained from a relatively recent national survey: Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2012-13. Based on a sample of 14,482 children of the age of below 5 years and by using the multiple linear regression analysis, this paper finds evidence to suggest that mothers' education matters for children's both long-term and overall nutritional status in Bangladesh. Nevertheless, education at the lower end has imperceptible effect; while the incremental benefit of below primary education on child nutrition is subtle. Importantly education at the higher end i.e., secondary or more has pronounced effect on children's nutritional status. This finding is worthy of policy attention because girls' dropout at the secondary education in Bangladesh is still very high, which may hinder realising the benefit of the costly public policy of educating girls for the sake of combating widespread child under-nutrition in the country.