<![CDATA[Nutritional quality during the toddler phase reflects the success of biological need fulfillment underpinning child health, growth, and developmental trajectories. Nutritional deficiency and imbalance persist as public health challenges, particularly within rural communities bearing distinct social characteristics and service access configurations diverging considerably from urban counterparts. This landscape undergoes conditioning by multiple determinants, encompassing maternal capacity in comprehending nutritional principles alongside caregiving patterns operationalized throughout child rearing. This examination explores the interconnection between both aspects and toddler nutritional conditions within the service territory of Puskesmas Desa Dikawongo Hari. An analytic quantitative approach through cross-sectional design was conscripted as the investigational foundation, recruiting 30 mothers through purposive sampling. Maternal knowledge and caregiving practices were positioned as predictor components, whilst weight-for-age index served as the outcome component. Information was harvested through questionnaire instruments combined with anthropometric data and processed through Spearman Rank correlation. Statistical calculations yielded r = 0.851 with p = 0.000 for maternal knowledge, whilst caregiving practices produced r = 0.861 with p = 0.000. These outputs signal that maternal nutritional literacy expansion alongside appropriate caregiving habit fortification warrants positioning as a prioritized thrust within toddler nutritional condition improvement endeavors.]]>
