Background and aims: Breastfeeding is one of the most effective behaviors to health promotion. One of the factors that affect on successful breastfeeding is mother's self-esteem. With regard consequences of low self-esteem that have negative impact on interpersonal relationships, thinking, feeling and person, practice, this study aimed to determine self-esteem and its related factors in primiparous women.
Methods: In this descriptive study, 300 Primiparous lactating mothers with children less than 6 months, referred to health centers in the Mashhad city were selected by multistage random sampling. Data collection was completed by Rosenberg Self-esteem questionnaire. Data were analyzed by SPSS software through Spearman correlation test, Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney.
Results: The mean and standard deviation of maternal self-esteem were 28.98±2.76. Most of women (94.33%) had the average level of self-esteem and only a small percentage of women (1.33%) had high self-esteem. Based on the results, there was a negative significant relationship between self-esteem and the child's age (P=0.01). In other cases, the relationship between self-esteem and variables such as age, education and income were not significant (P>0.05).
Conclusion: The results of this study showed that the self-esteem mean score of most nulliparous women during breast-feeding was moderate and due to the fact that the self-esteem affects their self-efficacy, feeling and performance, it is suggested that midwives and other health professionals consider psychosocial aspects that they affect self-esteem of breastfeeding mothers and do some measurements on self-esteem of these individuals in order to increase it.