How does hunger affect children?
Children are twice as likely to live in households where someone experiences hunger and food insecurity than adults. One in ten adults compared to one in five children live in households where someone suffers from hunger or food insecurity. Child poverty is more widespread in the United States than in any other industrialized country; at the same time, the U.S. government spends less than any industrialized country to pull its children out of poverty. 9 We have long known that the minds and bodies of small children need adequate food to develop properly. But science is just beginning to understand the full extent of this relationship. As late as the 1980s, conventional wisdom held that only the most severe forms of malnutrition actually alter brain development. The latest empirical evidence, however, shows that even relatively “mild” undernutrition—the kind of hunger we have in the United States—produces cognitive impairments in children which can last a lifetime, according to Dr. J. L
