Abstract
To investigate how kindergarteners cognitively developed in a family with an adult who experienced recurrent versus transitory food insecurity, a sample of 1,040 kindergarteners (mean age = 5.6 years) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 was analyzed using multilevel growth modeling. Results indicated that kindergarteners from homes with an adult who experienced recurrent food insecurity (twice within a 24-month period; n = 490) initially had slower growth in reading relative to their counterparts who were in homes with an adult who was food insecure only once over the same time period (n = 550). However, this initial disadvantage diminished over time. As a result, the recurrent group’s reading trajectory converged with that of their transitory peers by second grade. These findings highlight the value of adopting more temporal view of food insecurity and its developmental consequences.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
