Background: The assessment of mother's knowledge and practice aboutchild nutritional requirement is important in identification of the educationneeds. This research was conducted to assess the knowledge and practice of mothers about nutrition of children under 2 years of age and its relationship with socioeconomic factors in Shiraz health care centers, southern Iran.
Methods: In this descriptive-analytic cross-sectional study, 201 motherswith at list one under 2 years old child were selected by systematic random sampling from health centers in Shiraz, southern Iran. Knowledge and practice of mothers about the type and time of providing supplementary foods for the infants were assessed using a validated questionnaire via face to face interview. Also demographic and socioeconomic information were asked. Pearson correlation coefficient and ANOVA tests were used for data analysis. All analyses were performed using SPSS version 19.
Results: According to the findings of this study, 11.4% of mothers had alow level of knowledge and 29.4% of them had a desirable practice. Weobserved significant relationship between knowledge and job (P=0.002)and level of education ( P<0.001), also between practice and job (P=0.01) and level of education (P=0.046). we observed that mother's knowledge has significant positive correlation with mother's practice (r=0.6, P=0.001).
Conclusion: Since the knowledge of high percentage of mothers wasmoderate, and a high percentage of them had undesirable practice,continuing overall effort to increase mother's nutritional knowledge andpractice in order to prevention of infants malnutrition seems to be necessary.