Knowledge of Mothers on Child Language Milestones Development and Their Parenting Practice: The Case of Gambella Region Anywaa Zone Abwowu Woreda

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to assess mothers knowledge on child language milestones development and their parenting practice. To achieve the objective of the study, descriptive survey research design was employed with mixed research approach. From the total 320 population 177 sample were included in the study. To collect data from the participants, mothers knowledge on child language interview question and focus group discussion(FGD) was used for qualitative part. Where as parenting practice and mothers child interaction questionaire was used for quantitative part. The collected data from qualitative was analysed by describing the audio reports that was transcribed in to words and quantitative part was analysed by descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, frequency ,and percentage. The qualitative result of the study displayed that mothers have poor knowledge on their child language milestones development respectively.wheras the quantitative results for three parenting practice revealed that the rating score was found as 4116(31%) with mean score of (23.25) and (3.908)standard deviation on authoritative parenting practice, also rating score was found as 3489(28%) with mean score of (19.71) and (3.212) standard deviation on permissive parenting, and 3350(26%) with mean score of (18.93) and (2.822) standard deviation on authoritarian paenting practice. Those revealed that authoritative paenting practice was the dominant parenting practice with the highest rating score in selected area and mothers shows highest frequeny score on good interaction, whereas the lowets on poor interaction. Furthermore, the finding of this study showed that mothers have poor knowledge on language milestones of their childrens and practiced authoritative parenting practice with good interctions with their childrens so they needs effective education on milestones development, parenting & mother child interactions eventhough they have showed good parenting it might last only for childhood.