Influence of parental education on child mortality in Bangladesh: repeated cross-sectional surveys

ABSTRACT

Reducing the mortality of children under-5 (U5) is an essential part of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). Although Bangladesh has made progress in reducing child mortality, there remain inequalities among different sociodemographic groups. Education is one particular key factor with a multidimensional impact on child health and survival. This study assessed the association between parental education and U5 mortality using repeated cross-sectional Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey data. The risk of child death was substantially low among educated parents. Children of secondary or higher educated mother and father were about 30% (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.697, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.596 to 0.815, p< .001) and 26% (HR = 0.738, 95% CI 0.635 to 0.858, p < .001), respectively, less likely to die early. Children from wealthier households and born to mothers with long birth spacings were less likely to face an early death. The study findings emphasize on imparting education to parents as an intervention strategy to continue the reduction of child mortality rate in Bangladesh, which could be a policy direction toward achieving the SDGs.

Ethical clearance

The BDHSs were approved by the ICF Macro Institutional Review Board and the ethics committee of the Bangladesh Medical Research Council (BMRC). Participants gave written consent before the survey interview. All identification of the participants was anonymised before publishing data. Secondary data sets analyzed in this study are freely available on request from the DHS website (http://dhsprogram.com/data/available-datasets.com).

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge MEASURE DHS for providing access to the BDHS data sets. The authors would also like to acknowledge all individuals and institutions involved in the implementation of these surveys.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author’s contribution

JR Khan conceptualised the study, compiled the data, finalised analysis plan, performed the statistical analysis, and drafted the methods and results. RK Biswas conducted literature review, finalised analysis plan and wrote the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

There was no funding for this research.