'HUNGRY CHILDREN IN AMERICA'

Guest Thu 25 Sep 2014, 12:59

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

'Hungry Children in America'

Tim Taylor:

Hungry Children in America: One child in five in the United States lives in a "food insecure" household. Craig Gundersen and James P. Ziliak lay out the evidence in "Childhood Food Insecurity in the U.S.: Trends, Causes, and Policy Options," a Fall 2014 Research Report written for The Future of Children. ...

Unsurprisingly, families that are poor are more likely to experience food insecurity. But perhaps more surprisingly, the connection from poverty to food insecurity is by no means ironclad. After all, the U.S. spends over $100 billion on food-related programs for the poor, including food stamps, school lunches and breakfasts and others. As the authors write:

Clearly, the risk for child food insecurity drops quickly with income. But even at incomes two and three times the poverty level, food insecurity is quite high. Moreover, almost 60 percent of children in households close to the poverty line are in foodsecure households. This suggests that income is only part of the story and that other factors also contribute to children’s food security.

As the authors dig into the data on children living in food-insecure households, the theme that keeps emerging is the quality of parenting the children receive. ...

The takeaway lesson, at least for me, is that food stamps and school lunches do help to reduce food insecurity, as do programs that provide income support to those with low incomes. But when the adults in a household are having trouble managing their own lives, children end up suffering. The answers here are straightforward to name, if not always easy to do, like finding ways to get food to children directly (perhaps by expanding school food programs to the summers and weekends) and to help parents in low-income households learn how to stretch their limited resources. As I have argued before on this website, for many children, the parenting gap they experience may be limiting their development even from a very young age.

Posted by Mark Thoma on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 at 09:38 AM in Economics, Social Insurance | Permalink