Rural Children Know When Their Parents Skip Meals

By Kaitlin Buelow

Country summer is anything but quiet. A road-trip pit stop rings with cicadas, cows, and the distant hum of a tractor. But, hidden below, you might just hear the rumbling of a child’s stomach.

Bread for the World’s ongoing advocacy work, including our current campaign, Nourish the Future, supports efforts to ensure that children and families have food on their tables. Bread advocates for sufficient funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the country’s primary line of defense against hunger.

Rural communities are disproportionately affected by food insecurity: 9 out of 10 of the most food-insecure counties in the U.S. are rural. Rural life presents additional challenges for families already struggling to put meals on the table. We know what works to help solve the problem.

SNAP is critical for rural families. In fact, 90 percent of eligible rural families participate in SNAP to help fill gaps created by low wages and the high grocery prices common in rural economies. SNAP helps to improve these local economies, too: every federal dollar invested in SNAP benefits generates $1.79 of economic activity.

Despite reliable nonpartisan evidence that SNAP works, Congress voted to cut SNAP by $186 billion— or 20 percent–through a 2025 reconciliation bill. This is the largest cut to SNAP in history. According to analysis from the Urban Institute, 5.2 million Americans will lose at least $25 a month in SNAP benefits. The average SNAP benefit for fiscal year 2025 is $6.16 per person per day, so this is several days’ worth of grocery money.

We cannot afford to backtrack on a program that supports rural economies and the health of children and families.

According to the National Library of Medicine, families that participate in SNAP are already stretched thin: some parents buy groceries past their best-by dates, ration leftovers, and resort to skipping their own meals to have enough for their children. But we know that even parents’ efforts to shield their children from hunger do little to mitigate the effects of living in a hungry family.

A 2011 study from The Journal of Nutrition interviewed children living in food-insecure households and found that the children experience food insecurity differently from the adults around them. As one might expect, children did not talk about stretching food supplies or figuring out what they can afford. Rather, the children intuited their food situation based on their home pantry and their parents’ behavior. Even when they were told not to worry, the children in the study could tell when their parents skipped meals or were stressed about where upcoming meals would come from.

“I can tell by people’s expressions,” said one girl in the study. “[My parents] wouldn’t be frowning, but like it wouldn’t be a happy face, it wouldn’t be sad, it wouldn’t be any face at all, it would be just like–an empty face.”

Many children take measures to stretch the family’s food supply, often without their parents’ knowledge. This includes teaching themselves and their younger siblings to eat less, rationing snacks, and not asking for treats at the supermarket.

The impacts on children’s well-being are perhaps unsurprising. A study published in the Journal of Applied Research on Children synthesized research on the relationship between child health and household food insecurity. Considering both financial stress and children’s lived experiences of food insecurity at home, the study found that household food insecurity influences child development beyond poverty alone and presents challenges to children’s growth.

Researchers wrote, “HFI [household food insecurity] is indeed a powerful stressor that is likely to have a direct and indirect impact on the psycho-emotional, social, behavioral, and intellectual development of children… Our study indicates that the impact of HFI on child development is likely to be strongly influenced not only by nutritional factors but also by psycho-emotional issues affecting the family unit as a whole.”

Food insecurity is so much more than a physical threat to children—it is also a psychological threat to their health and development that can reverberate throughout their lives. Advocating for a strong nutrition safety net is part of the solution, especially in rural communities. Much more needs to be done, and joining Bread’s advocacy for SNAP and other essential resources for rural children will make a difference.  

By speaking up for rural families, you can help ensure every child grows up nourished and every parent is able to put food on the table. No child should watch their parents skip meals just so they themselves can eat.

Kaitlin Buelow is a Government Relations intern with Bread for the World.