Guidelines for Estimating
the Month and Year of
Birth of Young Children

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Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Rome 2008

ABSTRACT

A child’s age is an essential piece of information for evaluating the many facets of children’s nutritional status. Several core food security and nutrition indicators require child age for their construction. Examples include anthropometric indices of weight-for-age and height-for-age as well as core infant and young child feeding indicators such as continued breastfeeding at one year and minimum acceptable diet. In many countries, there is no custom of recording children’s date of birth and it becomes necessary to estimate the date of birth of the child by asking the child’s mother , father or primary caretaker a series of questions in order to approximate the month and year of birth. This information, together with the date of survey data collection, can then be used to calculate the child’s age in months and used for creating indicators which require child age.

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