The experience of family poverty during childhood, particularly during early childhood, has substantial, negative impacts on children’s development (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). In 2011, nearly one-quarter (24.1%) of U.S. households below the poverty line had food-insecure children (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2012), putting them at risk for poorer health, behavioral, and academic problems (Nord, 2009). More than half (57%) of food-insecure households participate in one of the three major public food assistance programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly known as food stamps), the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), or the School Lunch/Breakfast Programs (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2012), which have been shown to help combat food insecurity among low-income children (Hofferth & Curtin, 2005).

Neighborhood-level poverty also negatively impacts children’s development. Children who grow up in areas of concentrated poverty disproportionately experience adverse outcomes (Duncan & Murnane, 2011). However, little is known about how neighborhood poverty affects young children’s experiences of food insecurity, or about the compounding influences of family- and neighborhood-level. Further, whether receipt of public food assistance programs has differential effects on children’s food insecurity based on the neighborhood context remains unexplored.

This study examines the individual and compounding influences of household- and neighborhood-level poverty on young children’s experiences of food insecurity, and how public food assistance receipt changes these relationships. We link data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a nationally representative study of children from infancy to age five (N= 10,700), to corresponding contextual data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas using children’s residential zip codes. Responses to the 18-item Core Food Security Module (CFSM), public food assistance receipt, and a rich set of variables on child, parental, and household characteristics were collected at each wave.

We define neighborhood poverty as living in a zip code with a poverty rate of 30% or greater and containing a census tract (aka neighborhood) with a poverty rate of 40% or greater. Nationally, over 4.5 million people including 1.2 million children live in 1,850 such neighborhoods located within larger zip code areas. Using this restrictive definition of concentrated poverty, at each wave, 3-5% of children (300-550) in the ECLS-B live in one of these zip codes, and these children were more likely both to live in households with low food security and to receive food stamps than children in nonpoor neighborhoods, when controlling for family-level poverty. Future analyses will test different specifications of neighborhood poverty (e.g., 30% or more poor at the zip code level), food security (e.g., child and adult levels), and will use multilevel modeling to examine the individual and combined influences of family- and neighborhood-level poverty. We will exploit changes in poverty and food security over time and among children who move, and test how receipt of food assistance moderates these associations. Given the consequences of food insecurity, understanding the compounding influences of family- and neighborhood-level poverty and the differential effects of food assistance are important for identifying strategies for policy intervention.