Child Hunger: Starving the Future
Prove it Exists
Jahzaire Sutton, a 12-year-old boy from New York who has experienced the effects of hunger first-hand, recently appeared alongside educational reformists and celebrities on Education Nation to tell his story. Poverty hit the Sutton family so harshly, that often Jahzaire was forced to go to school hungry. “I wasn’t able to focus on my schoolwork and that kind of affected my report card grades…it was very frustrating, because it’s all I could think of, food, when I went to school,” recounted Jahzaire (Strauss). Jahzaire is but one of many children who wind up going to school hungry, and it is negatively impacting their chances of success both in the classroom, and in the real world. In schools, …show more content…
Families sometimes dig themselves holes they cannot climb out of, and because of phenomena like cyclical poverty, the hole deepens as time passes. Christina Dreier, an impoverished mother of two living in Iowa, is often forced to send her children to school hungry because she cannot afford to provide breakfast every morning. With bare cupboards and little extra money, every month she finds herself and her husband deciding which bills are more important to pay in a desperate attempt to set aside extra money to help supplement what is not given through their SNAP benefits (McMillan). The Dreier family is one of many struggling in the United States today. According to a study conducted by Feeding America, a non-profit network of food banks, 59 percent of food-insecure households “participated in at least one of the three major federal food assistance programs” of which included the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the National School Lunch Program (NSLP)” (Feeding America). When looking at the causes of food insecurity, however, poverty is but a drop of water in the ocean. Even at incomes two to three times the national poverty level, food insecurity is still a shockingly prevalent issue. Even so, a study conducted at Princeton shows that approximately 60 percent of children in households close to, or at the poverty line are still considered food-secure, which suggests that income is only part of the story (Gundersen & Ziliak, 2014). In the past, government policy has been a major combatant of childhood hunger and food insecurity, however, recent cuts to food assistance programs have made it more difficult for families to make ends meet where school programs cannot. In turn, this decrease in aid allows food insecurity to further-manifest