Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Children’s exposure to adversity and hardship places their cognitive and behavioral development at risk (Gershoff, Aber, Raver, & Lennon, 2007). One enduring form of hardship, which afflicted 15.8 million families in the US in 2015, is a lack of a stable source of nutritious foods, a phenomenon known as food insecurity (Rabbitt, Smith, & Coleman-Jensen, 2016). Importantly, a robust body of evidence demonstrates that children from food insecure homes can have lowered behavioral, emotional and academic outcomes (Shankar, Chung, & Frank, 2017). These developmental consequences are due, in part, to food insecurity’s link to poorer child health (Rose-Jacobs et al., 2008). Further, as a form of material hardship (Gershoff et al., 2007), food insecurity impacts several family-level factors, such as parental stress (Dunifon & Kowaleski‐Jones, 2003; Huang, Matta Oshima, & Kim, 2010), anxiety (Whitaker, Phillips, & Orzol, 2006) and depression (Bronte-Tinkew, Zaslow, Capps, Horowitz, & McNamara, 2007; Melchior et al., 2009) which, in turn, can compromise children’s development.

However, while evidence shows that the incidence of food insecurity at the household level can have negative effects on children, two key issues remain open for further investigation. First, we know less about how children develop in homes where an adult—as opposed to the household as a whole—experiences food insecurity. By focusing explicitly on adult food insecurity, we can more precisely pinpoint the underlying source of food insecurity’s effects to an adult in the home. Second, we have limited knowledge of whether and how the severity, versus the incidence, of food insecurity might detrimentally influence both child and parent outcomes (Gundersen, 2008).

Accordingly, in our study, we generate new insights that further elucidate food insecurity’s influence on children and their parents. Leveraging data on 5,640 parents from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11, we examined how the severity of adult food insecurity influenced their children’s reading and math abilities as well as their internalizing and externalizing behaviors. We also investigated how adults themselves were affected by their own experience of food insecurity by analyzing whether more severely food insecure adults had increased parenting stress levels. Methodologically, our study identified the effect of adult food insecurity by leveraging changes in the severity of adult food insecurity over time using a family fixed effects model that controlled for time stable factors, both observed and unobserved, that were potentially confounded with adults’ level of food insecurity.

We found that the severity of adult food insecurity was unrelated to children’s outcomes. Estimates were sufficiently precise to suggest zero effects. Though we were unable to detect effects on children’s outcomes, we found that more severely food insecure adults had higher parental stress levels. Adults whose food insecurity scale scores increased by one point over time had heighted parental stress by 0.047 SD (95% CI, 0.021 to 0.072; p<.001). In sum, our evidence shows that though adults who were more severely food insecure experienced higher parenting stress levels, children were shielded from the potentially detrimental developmental effects of adult food insecurity.