Living in a Food Desert: The Relationship between Food Security and Access and Maternal Self-Efficacy

• In Event: 1-204 - Reading Labels and Setting Tables: Examining Children’s Eating and Food-Related Parenting from an Ecological Perspective

Integrative Statement

Millions of American children live in low-access food deserts – areas with limited access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food (United States Department of Agriculture, 2017). These families often face food insecurity, the potential inability to obtain nutritious food in a socially acceptable manner (Casey et al., 2006). For mothers who are responsible for feeding their children and shaping their children’s early eating experiences, the inability to access or afford healthy food may have substantial impact. Researchers have linked low parental self-efficacy with unhealthy child outcomes and found that parental guilt may be associated with child health-related risk (Carvalho, Abanto, Mendes, Raggio, & Bonecker, 2012; Heerman, Taylor, Wallston, & Barkin, 2017). However, as yet, no empirical research has examined how low food access and security impact mothers’ perceptions of self-efficacy as parents and food providers. We hypothesized that mothers who are highly food secure would report significantly higher child-feeding and parenting self-efficacy than those of low and very low food security. In addition, household income and quality of perceived food environment would predict mothers’ child-feeding and parenting self-efficacy.

The study recruited adult mothers in Lucas County, Ohio with at least one child under the age of 18. Participants were recruited through branches of the Lucas County Public Libraries located in zip codes of varying median household incomes (ranging from $12,255 to $80,806). Of the 118 participants included in the study, 71.2% identified as white and 21.2% as African American. Participants completed a written survey, which included the United States Department of Agriculture’s (2012) U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module, Gilmore and Cuskelly’s 5-item version of Parenting Sense of Competence Scale (Heerman et al., 2017), and Ma et al.’s (2013) food environment perception questionnaire.

Mothers with very low and low household food security reported significantly lower self-efficacy for feeding their children than those with high food security, F(2, 117) = 6.31, p = .003. Furthermore, mothers with very low food security reported significantly lower parenting self-efficacy than those with low and high food security, F(2, 118) = 4.8, p = .01 In hierarchical regression analyses, perceived food environment predicted a significant amount of variance in parenting self-efficacy (β=-.24, p=.02) after household income (β=.23, p=.02) and number of children (β=-.15, p=n.s.) were accounted for in step 1 (F(3, 104) = 5.03, p=.003). In contrast, none of the individual predictors (income, number of children, perceived food environment) were significantly related to feeding self-efficacy in the final model (F(3, 104) = 2.7, p = .05; all β=n.s.).

Results indicate that food access and perceived food environment play an important role in mothers’ self-efficacy as parents. In fact, these variables were more consistently related to overall parenting self-efficacy than to feeding self-efficacy. These findings suggest important implications about the relationship between mothers’ ability to acquire healthy foods and their perceptions of effectiveness as parents. Attempts to address the issue of food deserts as a public health concern may have unique facets when the parent-child relationship is considered.
 

Authors

• Miranda L. Frank, Bowling Green State University
  Presenting Author

• Dara Musher-Eizenman, Bowling Green State University
  Non-Presenting Author