The Implications of COVID-19 for Food Insecurity and Psychological Wellbeing: Evidence from Daily Diaries

• In Event: Parenting Stress and Challenges During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Food insecurity – defined as lack of consistent access to food of the quantity or quality needed to fuel a healthy life – poses a well-documented threat to children’s socioemotional development (e.g., Ashiabi, 2005) and parents’ psychological wellbeing (e.g., Dunifon & Kowalski-Jones 2003). Emerging research indicates that food insecurity has surged amid the COVID-19 pandemic (Bauer, 2020), and that parents’ stress and depressive symptoms have risen alongside it, particularly among low-income families. The implication is that rising food insecurity has contributed to rising psychological distress among parents, directly and indirectly threatening children’s socioemotional wellbeing. The research linking food insecurity to parent mental health and child outcomes, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, is correlational and largely cross-sectional (e.g., Gee & Asim, 2019) so cannot establish the directionality and therefore causality of the effect food insecurity on family wellbeing and thus the implications of rising food insecurity amid COVID-19.

The present study offers two methodological innovations that allow for greater purchase on the directionality and causality of these links. As part of an evaluation of a school-based food assistance program, The Power Packs Project, from January – June 2020 we collected daily reports of food insecurity, parent depression, irritability, and harsh discipline as well as child mood and behavior problems from a sample of low-income families in rural Pennsylvania (N = 272). Because our study spanned the period before and after COVID-19-related restrictions, the data allow us to track how social restrictions immediately impacted families’ reports of food insecurity and psychological wellbeing. Moreover, because we gathered daily reports, we can better establish the temporal ordering of the food insecurity-parent wellbeing links, as a rise in daily food insecurity followed by a rise in parental depression or irritability would better establish the direction of this association than any one-time or even monthly snapshot assessment of the two. We will assess how families’ food insecurity and parent wellbeing and behavior were altered immediately after COVID-19-related restrictions were imposed using a series of longitudinal models to track daily outcomes and estimate the effect of restrictions on time trends.

Daily averages of survey responses show that parents’ food insecurity, and depression and anxiety increased starting in March; the share of parents who worried they would run out of food before they could afford to buy more increased by about 10 percentage points (Figure 1), and parents’ reports of worry and depression increased by over 1.2 standard deviations (Figure 2). Rates of both food and general worry declined in May, however, to near pre-COVID levels. The similarity in patterns across food insecurity and parent wellbeing suggest that as food insecurity rises and falls throughout the pandemic, parent wellbeing rises and falls in tandem. Our longitudinal analyses will capture this dynamic with precision with regard to parent depression, irritability, and discipline. Although the study’s findings will assess the implications of COVID-19 on a specific community, it will nonetheless illuminate its implications for the many low-income communities around the U.S. struggling amid this unprecedented pandemic.

Authors

• Samantha Steimle, Georgetown University
  Presenting Author

• Caitlin Hines, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anna D. Johnson, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anna Gassman-Pines, Duke Univeristy
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rebecca Ryan, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author