The Importance Of Food Insecurity In Children

As I twist and turn in bed, trying to ignore the echoes coming from within. My frustration rages and the same recurrent question of every night comes to my head. “Why me?” I ask. The more I ignore the echoes the louder they become, as if they were taunting me. It’s only been the first day of this miserable weekend, but it feels like years. Maybe if I can just manage to get a couple of minutes of sleep it will all fade away.
In the United States, it was estimated that in 2012 nearly 16 million U.S. children, or over one in five, lived in households that are were considered food insecure (Childhood Food Insecurity). As defined by Merriam-Webster, food insecurity, is a “lacking reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious

It can correlate back to food insecure children who lack physical fitness, if a child does not feel comfortable in their body, maybe because their rib cage pokes out more than a child who is raised in a food secure home or maybe if they suffer from a chronic illness that enables to love their body and themselves due to the lack of food nutrition, they then lose confidence and exclude themselves from their peers. Children may also feel stigmatized, isolated, ashamed or embarrassed by their lack of food. As the “Effects of Poverty, Hunger and Homelessness on Children and Youth” also stated, “children who lack food are commonly known to become easily agitated, which makes it difficult for them to get along with their peers”. They may start slipping into bad influences such as alcohol, drugs, smoking, and early sexual activity. Some behavior problems that can results from child hunger “may include impulsiveness, aggression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder” (Effects on Poverty). Just like no child wants to feel like they do not belong, no parent should want to see their child struggle to make a connection with the world and those in

I know that if finding a solution to this epidemic was easy, then child hunger would be gone overnight, but it is not always about trying to find a solution that will end the problem overnight. Sometimes it is best to just take a step back and do things one step at a time to overcome the issue. And that is exactly what parents should do when it comes to ending child hunger. The key points that I believe will benefit to ending child hunger would be improving the access to government assistance programs, such as SNAP and WIC, developing more school feeding programs, and providing more financial management assistance for parents. To begin with a way that the government could help assistance programs be more accessible to parents is by making the application and recertifying process equally accessible throughout the country. Some jurisdictions have office hours only during prime work hours, forcing parents to choose between missing work and wages or failing to enroll in SNAP or recertify (“Childhood Food Insecurity”). A great way to fix that problem would be by allowing parents to apply online, which would lead to increased participation and lower transaction cost. The next solution would be to develop more school feeding programs, in this case schools could offer more school breakfast opportunities for students who do not have the food needed at