Food Neglect and Infant Development

Abstract

The impact of food insecurity on child development in the general U.S. population is well-established, yet little is known about the harm of food neglect relative to other types of maltreatment. Due to the harmful physiological impact of inadequate nutrients and the social impact of food-related stress, it was hypothesized that food neglect would be more likely to impair infant cognitive and language development than physical abuse, sexual abuse, and other forms of neglect. Families of infants (N = 1,951) investigated by Child Protective Services were studied using the second cohort of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW II; NSCAW Research Group, 2002). Results from multivariable logistic regression models that controlled for likely confounding variables showed that the odds of impairment in cognition and language were significantly greater when food neglect was the most serious form of maltreatment. Considering that both food insecurity and child neglect are associated with poverty and parental mental health problems, it will be important for child welfare and mental health professionals to work collaboratively to better the health of these vulnerable children.

Understanding the Effects of COVID-19 on Child Maltreatment Reporting Among Rural Versus Urban Communities in the United States

“…Low Access to Food Store (LAFS) is the percent of people in a county living more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store if in a metropolitan area, or more than 10 miles from a supermarket or large grocery store if in a nonmetropolitan area. Studies have found that LAFS is often a significant predictor of CM (Helton et al, 2018 ). We used the log of the original variable to improve univariate normality.…”

“…We used this variable as a control to measure the effects of child economic hardship in each county. As with LAFS, child poverty rate is a common factor in analyses of CM (Helton et al, 2018 ). We top-coded this variable at 55% (i.e., data points above this threshold were recorded to 55%) in the regression models to improve univariate normality.…”

Obesity in childhood: associations with parental neglect, nutritional habits, and obesity awareness

“…Neglect may sometimes occur in the form of a lack of supervision about nutritional habits. In other words, parents do not set rules and establish control that will ensure the child’s healthy nourishment ( 15 ). In other words, the parents’ inability to set limits on the child’s nutrition, insufficient control of the child’s eating habits, lack of interest in where, how and what the child eats, allowing the child to consume fast food continuously and not teaching the child the right and wrong behaviors about nutrition can be considered as neglect ( 16 , 17 ).…”

Maltrato infantil por negligencia: salud mental y riesgo psicosocial en madres con expedientes legales

“…Lo antes señalado se convierte en una de las razones que justifican que la negligencia sea considerada un tipo de maltrato silencioso e invisible, lo que hace complejo tanto su reconocimiento como la caracterización de las familias con este tipo de problema (Bérubé et al, 2017;Delgado Meza, 2016;King et al, 2019;Helton et al, 2018;Ruiz y Gallardo, 2002), de manera tal que, ante la exposición prolongada, los efectos en el desarrollo de niños víctimas persisten incluso a lo largo de la vida (McLaughlin, 2017).…”