Parental Misperceptions on Child Nutrition in India: Implications for Child Feeding Practices and Growth

The goal of this randomized controlled trial is to examine the role of parental misperceptions and information gaps in contributing to poor child dietary practices and high child undernutrition rates in India. The main research questions it seeks to answer are: 1. Do mothers systematically overestimate the nutritional status (height- and weight-for-age percentiles) of their children, relative to global World Health Organization (WHO) standards and other children in their region?, 2. Do mothers underestimate the returns to child nutrition on long-term health, education, and labor market outcomes?, 3. What mechanisms could explain the formation of such misperceptions? Are mothers with higher exposure to undernourished children more likely to overestimate their children's nutritional status?, and 4. Would updating mothers' beliefs about a) their children's true height-for-age and weight-for-age percentiles, and/or b) the returns to child nutrition, improve child feeding practices, utilization of government nutrition services, and child growth outcomes? The study involves an individual-level randomized controlled trial with 1500 mothers of children aged 7-24 months in Telangana, India, with two information treatment arms and one control arm. The first treatment will update mothers' beliefs on the relative height- and weight-for-age percentiles of their children, and the second will provide information on the impacts of child undernutrition on long-term health (risk of chronic and infectious diseases, mortality), education (high school test scores, years of education), and labor market (earnings) outcomes. The treatment and control groups will be compared to assess if the information treatments improve outcomes related to child feeding practices, consumption of government-supplied therapeutic food, cognition measures, and child growth.