Children and Hunger

44% of children in East Central Indiana are food insecure  Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.  In East Central Indiana 54% of our children participate in the school lunch program and 49% in the school breakfast program.  Right now, these children may go to bed hungry tonight.  This problem is preventable.  Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana recognizes the severe implications hunger has on children’s physical and mental health.

Inadequate nutrition or food insecurity has adverse affects on:

Physical Health:  Hungry children suffer from two to four times as many individual health problems, such as unwanted weight loss, fatigue, headaches, irritability, inability to concentrate and frequent colds, as low-income children whose families do not experience food shortages.  The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate quantity or quality in the diet of the infant's mother.  Stunting (low height for age) in children also results from inadequate nutrition.  Iron-deficiency anemia in children can lead to adverse health effects such as developmental and behavioral disturbances that can affect children’s ability to learn to read or do mathematics, and increased susceptibility to lead poisoning.  Anemia remains a significant health problem among low-income children. 

Child Development:  Food insecurity puts children in jeopardy of developmental risk.  Developmental risk is an uninterrupted existence of vulnerabilities that is characterized with the slow or unusual development of children in areas such as speaking, behavior, and movement, which increases the likelihood of later problems with attention, learning, and social interaction.  Pregnancy women who are undernourished are more likely to have low-birthweight babies.  These infants are more likely to suffer delays in their development and are more likely to have behavior and learning problems later in life.

School Readiness and Achievement:  Children from food insecure households are more likely to struggle in their academic development.  Food insecure children are more likely to be ill and absent from school.  Food insecurity has a negative impact on children’s ability to learn in school.  School aged children who are food insecure cannot concentrate or do as well as others on the tasks they need to perform to learn the basics.  Research indicated that low-income children who participate in the School Breakfast Program show an improvement in standardized test scores and a decrease in tardiness and absenteeism compared to low-income students who do not eat breakfast at school.

Behavior and Mental Health:  Insecurity about whether a family will be able to obtain enough food to avoid hunger, also has an emotional impact on children and their parents.  Anxiety, negative feelings about self-worth, and hostility towards the outside world can result from food insecurity.  Food insecurity has also shown to be associated with suicide and depressive disorders among 15 to 16 year old children.