Social determinants of infant health includes sex of the infant, poverty levels of household, disability, race/caste and location (urban/rural), as well as maternal health. In particular maternal nutrition. Further, genetic factors that involve both parents are important to consider. We also need to see how much of money the government investments per capita into primary health care and water and sanitation. Situations of conflict and disasters make infant health worse. In some countries female infants are killed, or are less immunized and breast fed. South Asia is a case.  .On the whole parental factors alone may not be enough, mothers, families, government service, community situation make a difference. All the best   

Dear Dr soleimani

I believe SDH for infant development are:

level of  knowledge of family members

level of family economic situation

 level of support  infant and family in national progrom

nutritional situation and supportive  program for nutrition and malnutrition in national and local level of society and community

community based care for infants and their family in national and regional progrom

integrated care in primary health care (PHC) program

prevention of disease and disabilities for example: congenital disease, genetic and metabolic disease with increase care and mothers and family member knowledge in pregnancy, infancy stage, and deference normal and abnormal development.

thank you

fallahi

Dr. Farin:

Socio-economic factors: family income, parental education, occupation status and the type of occupation of parents. If income data is not available, you can use household wealth index or household expenditure as a proxy.

Demographic factors: Mom's age, mom's health status, in developing countries caste and ethnicity might matters, and number of siblings.

Geographic location factor: urban vs. rural location of household, distance to nearest health facility, travel time to go to the nearest health facility.

Other factors: Immunization status, access to portable or at least piped water, access to safe toilet, garbage disposal sewerage system.

How do you measure the infant development? Do you like to consider some health outcome measures such as height-for-age and weight-for-age? Or something else?

There might be some endogeneity issues. You want to address those issues in modeling your research.

Following paper might be helpful.

Socioeconomic gradients in early childhood health: evidence from Bangladesh and Nepal.

This is an open access article.

Good luck

Satis

Greetings, The SDH are well articulated in the literature and policy since the Declaration of Alma Ata all those years ago. Whilst these have been modified somewhat over the years they remain the key causative factors and can not really be separated into maternal and paternal factors as they act in concert on all not selectively. That said women can be more affected depending on their relative positioning / marginalisation they experience.

Professor Michael Marmot is just giving the annual Bower Lecture Series in Australia and addresses your question quite well. For more details see:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/

Click on the image and you will be able to access a transcript of the lecture. The second lecture probably relates to your enquiry more closely. 

I hope this assists.