One Half of U.S. Children Will Use Food Stamps

Nearly one half of American children—including 90% of black children and 90% of children who spend their childhoods in single-parent households—will eat meals paid for by food stamps at some point during childhood, reports a Cornell researcher.

Nearly one quarter of U.S. children will live in homes that receive food stamps for five or more years. Food stamps are important indicators of poverty and risk of food insecurity, “two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child’s health,” says Thomas A. Hirschl, Cornell professor of development sociology and coauthor of a study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The study is based on an analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a 32-year study of about 4,800 U.S. households; it builds on the authors’ 2004 research that reported that half of all Americans will use food stamps during adulthood.

And the risk of living in homes using food stamps is far from equitably distributed: Ninety percent of children who live with single parents (compared with 37% who live in married and other two-parent households), 90% of black children (compared with 37% of white children,) and 62% of those whose head of household did not graduate from high school (compared with 31% where the head has more than 12 years of school) “encounter spells of food stamp use,” the authors found.

Putting those risk factors together, the researchers found that 97% of black children living in nonmarried households where the household head has less than 12 years of education will have received food stamps, compared with 21% of white children living in married households whose head of household has 12 or more years of education.

Source: Cornell University