Household Instability and Child Food Insecurity

Yiwen Wang , University of Texas at Austin
Kelly Raley, University of Texas at Austin

Previous research has linked children’s family instability, as measured by mother’s marital-cohabiting transitions, to increased risk of poverty, illness, and poorer developmental outcomes. Family theories hypothesize that disruption of household routines and reduction in household resources link family instability to poorer child well-being. Recent research reveals that maternal partnership transitions represent a small fraction of the household instability children experience. These other forms of household instability also affect household resources and routines. The goal of this study is to see whether household instability generally is linked to one aspect of child food insecurity. We plan to extend this preliminary analysis to determine how non-parental household members in children’s households are associated with food insecurity using longitudinal data available in the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 2. Children & Youth