Half of Our Kids on Food Stamps

ChattahBox
November 3, 2009

[efoods]A new study finds that nearly half of all American children will need to use the federal food stamp program to eat at some point in their childhood, with the number much higher for African American children, at a startling 90 percent. And the current recession with persistently high unemployment rates, will cause the numbers of children on food stamps to rise even higher, say researchers.

The researchers, Mark R. Rank, PhD of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri and Thomas A. Hirschl, PhD of the Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York used thirty years of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics survey.

The study concluded that:

“American children are at a high risk of encountering a spell during which their families are in poverty and food insecure as indicated through their use of food stamps. Such events have the potential to seriously jeopardize a child’s overall health.”

The alarming results showed that between the ages of 1 to 20 years, nearly half (49.2%) of all U.S. children will live in a household that receives food stamps. Broken down by race, 37 percent of white children use food stamps, compared to a whopping 90 percent of black children.

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This article was posted: Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 10:31 am

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