mothers' knowledge and attitude toward food security in complementary feeding of 1-2 year-old offspring and its relation with demographic indices

Background: food insecurity denotes failure to provide adequate food. knowledge and attitude play a key role in food security, which is of paramount importance in the first two years of life. aim: this study aimed to evaluate mothers' knowledge and attitude towards food security in complementary feeding of 1-2 year-old offspring. method: using a cross-sectional study, 400 mothers of children 1-2 years old were selected from comprehensive health service centers in bushehr, in 2016. the data collection instrument included a self-made questionnaire with 20 knowledge questions with cvr=0.95, cvi=0.95, and reliability 0.7 as well as a questionnaire with 26 questions on the attitude with cvi=0.94, cvr=0.91 and reliability 0.76 which were completed by the mothers and analysis with spearman correlation, logistic regression and descriptive statistics. results: the mean age of the mothers was 29.5±4.9 years. we found that 74 (18.5%) of the mothers had an inappropriate level of knowledge and 10.5% of them had a negative attitude toward food security in complementary feeding. there was a significant positive correlation between knowledge and attitude (r=0.26, p=0.001). maternal age (or=1.10, p<0.001), maternal occupation (or=3.09, p=0.01), mothers with diploma (or=3.25, p=0.01) and academic education (or=12.29, p<0.001), fathers with diploma (or=3.37, p=0.004) and academic education (or=5.59, p<0.001), household income (or=7.13, p=0.001), and babysitting in kindergarten (or=3.17, p=0.03) were the factors associated with mothers' knowledge of food security. attitude was significantly related to maternal occupation (or=3.33, p=0.05) and income higher than 2000$ (or=4.87, p=0.03). implications for practice: long-term planning regarding demographic determinants such as educational level and identifying factors related to food security should be considered.