Study: Mom's money skills and mental health predict family's food adequacy

By Susan Lang

Even when poor rural families receive food stamps from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, many still do not have enough food, according to a new study by nutritionists at Cornell and their colleagues from several other land-grant universities.

The researchers found that about half of the families in their study used food stamps, and half of these families said they did not have enough to eat.

Important factors affecting whether poor rural families have enough to eat, the researchers say, are a mother's financial management skills, her depressive symptoms and her difficulty in paying medical bills.

"Because using food stamps has such a stigma in the United States, particularly in rural areas, only those families who are the worst off tend to use food stamps," explained Christine Olson, professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell and the lead author of the study, which is published in the current issue of Family Economics and Nutrition Review (Vol. 16, No. 1). "However, using food stamps is not enough to raise the standard of living among these very poor families to a point where they are no longer food insecure."

The study found that about half of the rural low-income families studied were "food insecure," defined as the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food. Olson and her co-authors interviewed 316 low-income families with children in 24 rural counties in 14 states. They found that after controlling for income and financial resources, one of the most significant factors in predicting whether a family was food insecure was how many food and financial skills the mother used. The more skills she used, such as managing bills, making a budget, stretching foods and preparing meals, the less likely she was to have a food-insecure household.

"This study is important because it's the first to show how important the food and financial skills and the health of the mother are in predicting whether a family is food insecure or not," said Olson.

The researchers also found that while about three-fourths of the families in the study had a high level of food and financial skills, about 40 percent of those with such skills were still food insecure, while more than 80 percent of those with lesser skills were food insecure.

"Our findings suggest that education in life skills, such as those taught by Cornell Cooperative Extension and the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, appear to be important ways to promote food security," Olson concluded. "To reduce food insecurity across rural America, health care at an affordable cost for both mental health problems and physical disabilities also is central."

The data for this paper was collected as part of the Rural Families Speak project. The study was supported by the Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station federal formula funds, Multistate Project NC-223 received from Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was co-authored by Kendra Anderson, former research support aide at Cornell; Elizabeth Kiss of Purdue University, Frances Lawrence of Louisiana State University Agricultural Center; and Sharon Seiling of Ohio State University.