Trends in children’s food insufficiency in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Children’s food insufficiency is a severe form of food-related hardship that may have intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using near real-time data from the Household Pulse Survey, this study analyzes trends in children’s food insufficiency in the United States during the pandemic period from June 2020 to December 2021. The results indicate that children’s low food sufficiency sharply increased in mid-July and early December 2020 and decreased with the third Economic Impact Payments rollout in early January 2021. This decrease suggests the payments’ potential to improve children’s food sufficiency. Comparatively, the status of children with very low food sufficiency has remained stable throughout the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• children
• food insufficiency
• household pulse survey
• Economic Impact Payment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I10
• I18
• I32
• J13

Acknowledgements

I thank the editor and the anonymous referee(s) for their suggestions and guidance for improving the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of any agency related to Korean government.

Notes

¹ Refer to the USDA-HFSSM, https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/8271/hh2012.pdf.

² Except for high-income earners with an adjusted gross income of more than $80,000.

³ Adults without children in the household were excluded. Observations with missing income, approximately 4% of the sample (N = 33,030), were dropped for the analysis, which did not affect the final results. There was no more case where observations were dropped by any specific criteria except list-wise deletion of item-nonresponse on the control variables. These were too small to affect the final results.

⁴ The questionnaire asks “During the last 7 days, did you or anyone in your household get free groceries or a free meal?”.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.