Improving infant and young child feeding practices is critical to improved nutrition, health, and development of children. Ethiopia adopted the WHO recommendations of child feeding practices and developed the national guideline. In spite of this fact, only few children start and received appropriate complementary feeding based on the recommendation. Therefore, the study aimed to determine dietary diversity score and its associated factors among under five children at Dabat Health and Demographic Surveillance System site (HDSS), northwest Ethiopia.

A cross-sectional community based study was carried out from February to June 2016. All children aged 6–59 months old who lived in HDSS site were included in the survey. Odds ratio (OR) with the corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated to show the strength of association. Finally, variables with a P-value of < 0.05 were considered statistically significant..

In this study, a total of 3433 children were included. About 34.87% (95%CI: 33.27, 36.49%) of the children received adequately diversified diet. The odds of receiving adequately diversified diet was higher among children whose mother had secondary and above education (AOR = 6.51; 95%CI: 4.95, 8.56), had antenatal care (AOR = 1.90; 95%CI: 1.60, 2.26) and postnatal care visits (AOR = 1.31; 95%CI: 1.00, 1, 72), and children who feed with their family (AOR = 1.39; 95%CI: 1.17, 1.65). However, a lower dietary diversity score was observed among younger children; 6–11 months old (AOR = 0.59; 95%CI: 0.41, 0.85), and children from food insecure household (AOR = 0.76; 95%CI: 0.63, 0.92).

Diversified diet feeding practice is low in Dabat HDSS site. Age of the child, maternal education, antenatal and postnatal care visits, and household food insecurity were significantly associated with dietary diversity of children. Hence, ensuring household food security and enhancing the coverage of maternal health care utilization are recommended to increase dietary diversity of children.