International Journal Of Healtcare Research ISSN : 2620-5580 Vol 1, Number 2, Issue 3, Month December 2018 Health Counseling to Enhance Maternal Knowledge about Nutrition in Toddlers (Sofiana & Khusna) 59 Health Counseling to Enhance Maternal Knowledge About Nutrition in Toddlers Liena Sofiana 1 , Arfiani Nur Khusna 2 1 Faculty of Public Health, Universitas Ahmad Dahlan 2 Faculty of Industrial Technology, Universitas Ahmad Dahlan JalanProf. Dr. Soepomo SH., Janturan Warungboto Yogyakarta, Email:liena.sofiana@ikm.uad.ac.id, Telp. +628587555584 A B S T R A C T Background: The level of maternal knowledge about high nutrition can affect the diet of baby and will certainly affect nutritional status of toddlers. The knowledge can be generated from several ways, one of them is counseling. Counseling is one method can be used easily to provide the knowledge about the nutrition of toddlers to mothers. Objective: The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of health counseling about nutrition of toddlers on mothers in the posyandu Kauman Yogyakarta. Methodology: This study used quasy experimental with pretest and posttest. The populations in this study include all mothers of children who came to the posyandu Kauman Yogyakarta with the sampling technique with total sample are 26 respondents. The processing data used the Wilcoxon test because the data is not normally distributed. Results: The results shows that there is an effect of health counseling in increasing maternal knowledge about nutrition of baby in Kauman Yogyakarta posyandu (p = 0.000). Conclusion: there is an effect of health counseling in increasing maternal knowledge about nutrition of children in posyandu Kauman Yogyakarta. Keywords: Health education, knowledge, nutrition. Copyright © 2018 University Ahmad Dahlan, All rights reserved 1. INTRODUCTION The development of nutritional problems in Indonesia is more complex, because in addition to still facing the problem of malnutrition, the problem of excess nutrition is also must be solved seriously. Riskesdas results in 2007 and 2013 shows that underweight conditions increased from 18.4% to 19.6%, stunting also increased from 36.8% to 37.2% 1 . According to the Regional Food and Nutrition Action Plan (RAD-PG) 2011-2015 Yogyakarta malnutrition have impacts such as low work productivity, reduced cognitive ability and loss of resources due to high health costs. Malnutrition is associated with mortality and morbidity. Infant mortality rates are closely related to the nutritional status of children. Children who suffer from poor nutrition generally have low immunity and this makes them vulnerable to infections that can cause the mortality. The low nutritional status of children school will have a negative impact in improving the quality of human resources 2 . Based on the results of the study, several factors that influence nutritional status are low family income, lack of maternal knowledge and a lack of levels of protein energy consumption in children 3 . The level of maternal knowledge about high nutrition can affect the diet of toddlers and surely will give the affect toward nutritional status of toddlers. If the mother's knowledge is good, she