Mothers’ milk a remarkable superfood, known for providing all the essential nutrients in perfect proportions for optimal growth and development of the babies. But it also needs to be complemented by other foods when the babies reach to six months to meet the increased nutritional demands of the babies The present study focusses to assess the influence of socio-economic and demographic contexts of mothers in relation to their knowledge and practice related to complementary feeding practice of total 300 respondents viz 150 rural and 150 urban mothers each comprising of 75 working and 75 non-working mothers of reproductive age, having a child of six to thirty-six months of age at Pusa in Samastipur District and at Patna city in Patna district of Bihar. Here, knowledge of mothers only refers to the information on various aspects related to complementary feeding such as suitable age to start complementary feeding, The study also aimed to assess the feeding practices adopted by mothers which include questions such as reason for early top feeding, consistency and quantity per serve etc. Self-designed and validated questionnaire were used to collect the raw data which were further arranged and analysed using Percentage Analysis, Chi-Square test and correlation using Excel, SPSS 20. This study found a significant relationship between the economic status and knowledge of urban mothers at 0.05 P level, which infers that the economic status of mothers does play a role in knowledge of mothers. It means that good economic status resulted in good knowledge of mothers. However, the economic condition does not influence the feeding practices opted by the urban mothers. In the case of rural mothers, economic condition has no influence on their knowledge as well as their feeding practices.

The correlation found between knowledge of rural and urban working/ non- working mothers was non- significant except r =.264, between RWK (knowledge of rural working) and UNWK (knowledge of urban non- working) which was significant at 0.05 P level. It indicates that rural working mothers and urban non- working mothers have similar knowledge profile. This study briefly illustrates the different style of feeding practice adopted by mothers of all the four sub-categories. The correlations between feeding practices of rural and urban working mothers (r = 0.282) and rural non- working and urban working mothers (r = 0.275) were found to be significant. This implies that the feeding practices followed by the rural working/ non-working mothers and urban working mothers seems to have a similar trend. In contrast, the urban non-working mothers were found to be less correlated with mothers from all the remaining three categories which suggest that the urban non- working mothers choose to follow a different feeding style Overall, this study provides an insight into the feeding practices adopted by mothers living in rural and urban areas and highlights the impact of living standard and lifestyle on the choice of baby food.