Background: The intergenerational continuity of undernutrition is influenced by shared genetic,rnhousehold socio-economic and cultural resources which will be associated with the mother andrnthe child nutritional status, possibly to the same degree. Provided that this assumption is valid,rnassessing maternal nutritional status will provide an effective screening tool for their childrenrnnutrition status.rnObjective: To examine whether maternal undernutrition indicators can be used as a proxyrnindicator of their offspring’s undernutrition.rnMethods: Data were obtained from the 2011 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey (EDHSrn2011). An analytical sample of 8,505 children whose mothers are not pregnant and live with theirrnbiological mothers was included. The bivariate associations between nutritional indices of thernmother and the children were analyzed with Pearson correlation coefficients. The sensitivity,rnspecificity, predictive values and area under Roc curves were calculated. We performed ROCrnregression analysis to determine factor that affects the accuracy of maternal underweight as arnscreening tool. We further performed rocreg postestimation to determine where exactly the testrnperformed best.rnResults: Mean BMI of mothers with stunted children was 20.01 (95% CI: 19.86–20.16), whereasrnthat mothers with no stunted children was 20.46 (95% CI: 20.31– 20.62). Similarly, children whornexperienced underweight or wasting had mothers who had consistently lower BMI than thosernwho did not (p