Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

For families across the US, the probability of experiencing food insecurity—the lack of stable and nutritious foods—is significantly greater if the family is raising a child with a disability (Sonik, Parish, Ghosh, & Igdalsky, 2016). While children from food insecure homes can have lowered behavioral, emotional and academic outcomes (Shankar, Chung, & Frank, 2017), the bulk of this research typically has focused on families irrespective of whether they are raising children with disabilities. Unfortunately, we know much less about how children with disabilities from food insecure households fare. Understanding the consequences of food insecurity for children with disabilities is critical given that these families can also face additional challenges, including poverty, which can negatively and cumulatively impact children’s developmental outcomes (Parish, Rose, Grinstein-Weiss, Richman, & Andrews, 2008). Knowledge of how children with disabilities fare in food insecure homes can inform ongoing policy discussions of how to best target and support families raising children with disabilities as they confront complex intersectional challenges, including different forms of material hardship (Parish et al., 2008).

Given this prominent gap in the knowledge base, the goal of this study is to investigate how food insecurity influences the developmental outcomes of children with disabilities who are in first grade. The developmental outcomes I use are parent reports of their children’s social interaction skills(i.e., the ability to interact positively with others (Tourangeau et al., 2012); and their overactive/impulsivebehaviors. To conduct my analysis, I leverage data on approximately 1400 households with a child with a disability from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11. Methodologically, I identify the effect of household food insecurity by leveraging changes in the incidence of household food insecurity over time using a family fixed effects (FE) model that controls for time stable factors, both observed and unobserved, that are potentially confounded with household food insecurity. The FE models also control for key time-varying factors (e.g., changes in other material hardships) likely to be confounded with changes in food insecurity status. Finally, I include survey weights to handle survey non-response while I handle missing data using multiple imputation.

Preliminary results show that household food insecurity led children with disabilities to have significantly higher overactive/impulsive behaviors (β= .38; p< .01). In addition, these children also had lower social interaction skills (β= -.22; p< .10); however, this result was not significant at conventional levels of significance, so I could not rule out zero effects. In sum, this preliminary evidence shows that household food insecurity can negatively influence the social skills of children with disabilities, especially their overactive/impulsive behaviors. These results underscore the importance of providing food assistance to families with children with disabilities, as it may not only stabilize their access to food thereby promoting overall family health and wellness, but it may also have critical implications for improving their children’s social wellbeing.