As high food costs and cuts to food assistance squeeze families’ budgets, concerns are growing about whether low-income parents will be able to keep putting food on the table.
But these financial pressures threaten to do more than increase hunger. They also risk harming children’s diets and health in the long run — by making nutritious foods not only harder to afford, but also increasingly risky for parents to buy.
To understand why, consider the most universal of parenting frustrations: picky eating. Most parents experience it, but the stakes vary widely. For well-off parents, watching a child push away a helping of vegetables is annoying but manageable. A carrot left untouched one day can simply mean trying again the next.
But for parents living close to the bone, that same rejected carrot is more than frustrating. It represents money that could have been spent on something their child would have actually eaten.
Simply put: Children’s food refusals come at a cost — one that few cash-strapped families can afford.
Such financial risks profoundly shape how low-income parents feed their kids, as sociologists have documented for years. A decade ago, Caitlin Daniel first showed how the risk of wasting money on rejected nutritious foods led low-income parents to prioritize buying less healthy items they knew their kids would eat. Years later, one of us (Priya) found that catering to kids’ preferences was also driven in part by parents’ earlier bouts of food insecurity: Determined to spare their children those experiences, caregivers often relied on familiar, comforting foods they knew would fill their kids’ stomachs.
Our newest study adds another dimension to this picture. Low-income parents across three states described going to considerable lengths to prioritize children’s nutrition, often at the expense of their own diets.
At the same time, to conserve resources and keep dinnertime from turning into a battle, they paid close attention to their kids’ likes and prioritized buying what they knew their children would eat. As one mother put it, she’d rather her daughter be “happy and fed than sad and hungry.”
Within such severe financial constraints, catering to children’s preferences is strategic. But it can also undermine children’s diets and health over time. That’s because raising kids to be healthy eaters is a long game: Children’s tastes develop gradually as they encounter and become familiar with different foods, and young children often need to try unfamiliar, healthier ones — like bitter vegetables — multiple times before accepting them.
That’s why pediatricians and nutrition experts routinely encourage parents to keep offering fruits and vegetables, even when kids turn them down. It’s smart advice, but it assumes parents can shoulder the costs of following it.
For families with little money to spare, doing so has always been a gamble. And today, it’s becoming an even bigger one. Groceries now cost nearly a third more in dollar terms than they did in 2020. Meanwhile, participation in SNAP — the nation’s largest food assistance program — has fallen by over 5 million people, including an estimated 2 million children, since summer 2025.
These economic pressures are now showing up in parents’ food decisions. A national survey found that more than half of low-income parents reported cutting back on groceries, while over two-thirds worried about having to choose between paying bills and buying healthy food for their children.
Forcing parents into such trade-offs doesn’t just threaten their ability to keep children fed. It also undermines their efforts to help children eat — and learn to enjoy — nutritious foods.
Fortunately, there are ways to address both problems.
First and foremost, we need to ensure children have enough to eat. That means restoring access to food assistance. The next Congress should reverse the cuts to SNAP enacted through H.R. 1 and stop SNAP benefit costs from being shifted to states — a shift that could jeopardize continued access to a program millions of families depend on to put food on the table. To make a bill reversing the cuts veto-proof, it should be a bipartisan effort.
But we also need to invest in programs that support parents’ efforts to feed their children nutritious foods, including incentives that make those purchases more affordable and less financially risky. Protecting and strengthening WIC’s fruit and vegetable benefit and expanding produce incentives like Double Up Food Bucks for SNAP recipients can help families stretch their grocery dollars further, giving them more room to buy nutritious foods their children might not eat the first time around.
Schools and childcare programs must also be critical partners in this work. Beyond providing nutritious meals, they can give kids regular opportunities to encounter and try healthier foods without leaving parents to shoulder the full financial burden. Expanding initiatives like the Department of Agriculture’s Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program and Farm to School programs, which help introduce children to new foods through fresh produce, taste tests, gardens, and other activities, can help.
Nutrition experts are right to encourage parents to keep introducing healthy foods, even when their children refuse them. But advice that families can’t afford to follow simply won’t cut it. We need food policies that not only ensure children have enough to eat, but also give parents the resources and support to help them develop healthy eating habits that last.
Priya Fielding-Singh is the director of policy and programs at the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University and the author of “How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America.” Darcy Cherlin is the research project manager at the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University.
Source: www.statnews.com
