Determining pathways from food insecurity to parent and child well-being

Food insecurity (FI), the lack of consistent access to food, is a public health crisis that affects over 6 million children in the US each year. FI predicts maladaptive outcomes in every domain of child development with long-lasting life and health consequences, but we do not know how and why FI carries negative effects. To establish effective public health initiatives to address FI, we must understand how it works to undermine development, and identify which aspects of FI may be sensitive to intervention. FI increases parental mental health problems, stress, and harsh parenting practices in a way that likely contributes to FI’s detrimental effects on child well-being, but mechanistic details about the association are uncertain. It is assumed that FI works primarily through parents to influence children, but due to measurement and methodological limitations of current research, that pathway is unclear. It is possible that parental depression limits parents’ ability to secure food in ways that lead to FI, or that FI affects child behavior directly, which leads to changes in parent mood and behavior. Isolating which of these patterns is occurring, or which is occurring for whom and when, will inform which members of the family and community to target for food assistance programs. Further, the time course over which the relationship between FI and parent and child well-being operates has not been carefully characterized. FI has only been examined over long time periods, like years, so we do not know how quickly negative effects emerge. Understanding how FI works across shorter timelines, such as weeks and days, and if that time course varies by FI type, will allow us to understand the ways in which frequently experienced gaps in food assistance impact children in real time. The planned research will apply innovative methods to study the relationship between FI and parent and child well-being, presenting results to craft public health interventions that target the most promising set of solutions. The training plan described in this proposal will provide me with foundational knowledge in stress physiology and biomarkers, as well as the methodological and quantitative techniques necessary to address the following key questions about the link between FI and parent and child well-being: 1) What is the directionality of the relationships between FI and parent and child well-being? and 2) Over what time scale do effects emerge and sustain? In the proposed study, I will leverage new conceptual, methodological, and statistical training to address these gaps in understanding, using a within-person approach with daily repeated measures of FI and parent and child well-being. In addition, training in stress physiology will prepare me to explore, in the future, how physiological effects of FI contribute to the impact of FI on parent and child well-being. This post-doctoral fellowship will provide me further training in domains necessary for launching my career as an independent researcher. Further, the results of this proposal will help shape this translational science on a highly significant public health threat to millions of children’s immediate and longer-term health and development.