Introduction

Early initiation and exclusive breastfeeding are encouraged for a number of reasons. A child should receive breast milk with other complementary foods starting from the age of 6 months to 24 months. However, conditions related to the mother and infant contributed to a delay in initiation of breastfeeding and duration of breastfeeding practice.

Material and methods

A cross-sectional study design was employed with a direct face-to-face interview of the subjects. Data were coded, validated and analyzed using SPSS version 23.0 and finally presented in tables and figures.

Results

All women who were interviewed know about early breastfeeding and those who had a previous maternal experience have exclusively breastfed their infants for some time. 61.05% of mothers initiated breastfeeding within 1 h after delivery. 65.66%, 59.64%, 51.58% of mothers know, believe and practiced exclusive breastfeeding for full 6 months respectively and 55.42% and 57.89% of mothers know and have practiced breastfeeding their child more than eight times a day respectively. The most common perceived barriers to breastfeeding are being too busy to breastfeed and lack of support to the mother. Age of the mother > 18 years, educational level of > 8th grade and previous maternal experience, improve their knowledge about early initiation of breastfeeding, importance of colostrum feeding and frequency of complementary feeding.

Conclusions

Knowledge about time of initiation of breastfeeding and attitude are good but the practice lags behind and the knowledge, attitude and practice of the frequency of breastfeeding is not optimal.