Food Insecurity in Families With Children : Integrating Research, Practice, and Policy

This book synthesizes research about the effects of food insecurity on children, families, and households, emphasizing multiple pathways and variations across developmental contexts. It focuses on emerging new methods that allow for a more refined approach to practice and policy. The volume provides a brief overview of the topic, and additional empirical chapters pose and address unanswered research questions. It concludes with a short commentary, providing recommendations for future research and policy and yielding a significant and timely contribution to advance developmental scientific knowledge and promote its use to improve the lives of children and families.

Featured areas of coverage include:

• The effects of early food insecurity on children’s academic and socio-emotional outcomes.
• The effects of household food insecurity on children with disabilities.
• Early childhood access to Women, Infants, and. Children (WIC) and school readiness.
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and adolescent mental health.

Food Insecurity in Families with Children is an essential resource for policy makers and related professionals as well as graduate students and researchers in developmental, clinical, and school psychology, child, youth and family policy, public health, and social work.

Barbara H. Fiese is the Pampered Chef Endowed Chair in Family Resiliency, Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, Emerita. She is considered one of the national experts on the role that shared family meals may play in promoting health. Dr. Fiese is a principal investigator or co-investigator on multiple federally funded projects aimed at examining environmental and biological factors contributing to early nutritional health. She is also the PI on several projects aimed at increasing the efficiencies of summer and after school feeding programs for food insecure children and youth.

Anna D. Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University. She co-directs Georgetown’s Child Development and Social Policy Lab and is a Research Fellow at Child Trends in Washington, DC. Dr. Johnson’s research focuses on evaluating policy solutions designed to enhance low-income children’s development and school readiness, such as publicly funded child care and prekindergarten programs. Dr. Johnson also studies food insecurity as a threat to the healthy development and school readiness of low-income children.