This paper investigates economic and psychological hardship during the COVID‐19 pandemic among a diverse sample (61% Latinx; 16% White; 9% Black; 14% mixed/other race) of socioeconomically disadvantaged parents (90% mothers; mean age = 35 years) and their elementary school‐aged children (ages 4–11; 49% female) in rural Pennsylvania ( N = 272). Families participating in a local food assistance program reported on food insecurity (FI) and parent and child mood and behavior daily from January to May 2020. Longitudinal models revealed that FI, negative parent and child mood, and child misbehavior significantly increased when schools closed; only FI and parent depression later decreased. FI decreased most among those who received the local food assistance program; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program receipt uniquely predicted decreases in child FI.

Food insecurity—lack of access to sufficient food for an active and healthy lifestyle—affects more than 10 million children in the United States. Ample research links food insecurity to hampered child physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development and provides insights for policy. After introducing food insecurity and its measurement, this article summarizes what is known about the effects of food insecurity on child development. It then considers how food insecurity harms children and explores both direct pathways through child health and indirect pathways through parenting and parent well-being. Finally, after reviewing existing policy for reducing food insecurity, we provide suggestions for new policy and policy-targeted research.

This article examines changes from 1986 to 2016 in the characteristics that parents in the United States most value in their children and differences in those values by parent income and education. Background: As a result of interrelated labor market changes, income-and education-based differences in parents' terminal values that have characterized U.S. families for generations are hypothesized to have converged by income and education during this period.

The present study examines variation in the effect of birth weight on children's early cognitive and socioemotional outcomes by family socioeconomic status (SES). It is hypothesized that not only will lower birth weight children display worse cognitive and socioemotional outcomes prior to school entry, as prior research has found, but that effects will be stronger for lower-SES children. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, the study compares the age 4 outcomes of twins discordant for birth weight (N~1,400). Twin fixed-effects models are run on the full twin sample and separately for low-and high-SES children. Results support the study's hypotheses, suggesting that socioeconomic risk accentuates the effects of birth weight on early development.

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