[Characteristics of urban families with malnourished infants]

Some essential aspects of families with malnourished infants being treated in the Nutritional Rehabilitation Centers managed by the Corporation for Infant Nutrition (CONIN) of Santiago, Chile, were studied in depth. The purpose was to identify and quantify some variables of the family environment as a previous necessary step for the application of an adequate social treatment. The design used is of a descriptive nature. The sample is representative of two of the Centers. The data obtained revealed the following: 1) the families belonged, without exception, to a low socioeconomic level, 21% in extreme poverty; 2) 64.8% of the mothers exhibited a low affectivity index, and in 88.1% of the families a pattern of a most deficient parent-child communication prevailed; 3) 90.4% of the families lived almost totally isolated from the rest of the community; 4) 76.4% of them had an internal physical environment with extremely scarce color stimuli, brown being the predominant color. The findings also revealed that in these families both physical and emotional environments are highly negative and hinder the maintenance of a normal nutritional condition of the child once he returns home after discharge from the Center. This implies not only a late discharge of the child (at a high institutional cost), but it also entails a high risk of his relapsing into malnutrition unless affectivity, communication, physical environment and perhaps other intra-family conditions improve.