From CBPP re Food Security

Research Note: Nearly 2 Million Young Children in the U.S. Lived in Food-Insecure Households in 2023

September 15, 2025

Food is an essential human need, and even more so for infants and toddlers during the critical early months of rapid growth and development. The United States has the resources to ensure everyone has enough to eat. Yet millions of people across the U.S. experience food insecurity, meaning they struggle to afford enough food for an active, healthy life year-round. In 2023, the most recent data available, 33.6 million adults and 13.8 million children — including nearly 2 million children under 3 years old — lived in food-insecure households, meaning more than 1 in 8 households (13.5 percent) in the U.S. had difficulty acquiring food due to lack of resources.^[1]

Millions of Children in Households Struggling to Afford the Basics — Figure 1

Households with young children are more likely to experience food insecurity. More than 1 in 7 (15.5 percent) households with infants and toddlers under 3 were food insecure in 2023, compared to 11.9 percent of households without children and 13.5 percent of all households. Nationally, more than 1 in 6 (17.1 percent) children under 3 lived in food-insecure households in 2023 and this share varies across states. (See Table 1.) These shares also vary by race and ethnicity, with children under 3 in American Indian or Alaska Native (30.3 percent), Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (26.3), Black (25.9), and Hispanic (22.4) households more likely to live in food-insecure households than those in Asian (5.5) or white (10.9) households.^[2]

Roughly half of the children under age 3 who lived in food-insecure households didn’t experience food insecurity themselves, but the adults in those households were food insecure. Parents often find ways to maintain normal meal patterns for their children, even when they are food insecure themselves; these families often face other challenges as a result of their precarious financial circumstances. And in many households, food insecurity among children is so severe that caregivers report that children were hungry, skipped a meal, or did not eat for a whole day because there was not enough money for food.

Children are especially vulnerable to poverty, financial strain, and hardship. For infants and young children, the lack of access to good nutrition can lead to less favorable life-long outcomes. Caregivers’ struggles paying for food and other bills are linked to worse child outcomes.^[3] Material hardship such as the lack of food also increases the risk for child welfare involvement due to neglect and abuse.^[4] There is growing awareness among researchers that the consequences of adversity — poverty, abuse or neglect, parental substance use disorder or mental illness, housing instability, and exposure to violence — during the early years of life can extend well beyond childhood and affect people’s physical, mental, and economic well-being as adults.^[5]

Conversely, when public policies provide economic security for their families, children tend to have better educational, health, and behavioral outcomes.^[6]

Positive Health and Well-Being Effects of SNAP and WIC Last a Lifetime

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) delivers more nutrition assistance to low-income children than any other federal program, making it the nation’s largest child nutrition program. In 2024, SNAP helped about 16 million children each month — about 1 in 5 U.S. children — including 2.8 million children under the age of 3.

While SNAP provides only a modest benefit — just $6.20 on average per person per day — it forms a critical foundation for the health and well-being of children in the U.S., lifting millions of families and their children out of poverty and improving food security. Food insecurity among children fell by roughly a third after their families received SNAP benefits for six months, a USDA study found.^[7]

For young children in particular, SNAP’s benefits last a lifetime. Studies have found children have improved birth outcomes and better health, education, and employment outcomes as adults if they had SNAP access during early childhood or if their parent had SNAP access during pregnancy.^[8] Access to SNAP among families with children is associated with reductions in child maltreatment reports and child welfare involvement.^[9] Emerging evidence also suggests that SNAP helps decrease decades-long racial inequities in food security, reducing the gap between white households and Black and Hispanic households, who are more likely to experience food insecurity because of starkly unequal opportunities and outcomes in education, employment, health, and housing.^[10]

The federally funded WIC program — more formally known as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children — also improves lifetime health for low-income pregnant and postpartum parents, their infants, and young children. Among other health and developmental improvements, WIC participation is associated with reduced risk of premature birth, low birthweight, and infant mortality. This is especially important because pregnancy-related complications and mortality, as well as infant mortality, are higher for families of color than for white families, again due to unequal access to health care and broader inequities in health, economic, and other systems for people of color.

Despite these benefits, only about half of all people eligible for WIC were enrolled in 2022. Less than half (46 percent) of eligible pregnant parents participated in WIC. Only 64.1 percent of eligible infants and children under the age of 3 participated.^[11] And participation declines as children grow older. While nearly 4 in 5 (78.4 percent) infants eligible for WIC participated in the program in 2022, the rate drops to 65 percent, 50 percent, 44 percent, and 25 percent among children 1 to 4 years old, respectively.^[12]

There are many opportunities for state agencies to reach more eligible families with low incomes, and these efforts are showing promise, with take-up and participation increasing in recent years. While data on WIC coverage rates for 2023 and 2024 are not yet available, nationwide average monthly participation increased by 7.1 percent between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, suggesting that coverage rates may have increased modestly.^[13]

Increasing WIC take-up across the board — and for pregnant parents of color and their infants in particular — can be an important part of a strategy to improve pregnancy-related and child health, mitigate the large pregnancy-related health disparities affecting these communities, and advance racial equity in other aspects of pregnancy-related and child health and food security.^[14]

Megabill Cuts Threaten Access to Nutrition Assistance

The harmful Republican megabill, H.R. 1, enacted on July 4, 2025, will dramatically raise costs and reduce food assistance for millions of people by cutting federal funding for SNAP by $187 billion (about 20 percent) through 2034, the largest cut to SNAP in history. These cuts will increase poverty, food insecurity, and hunger, including among children.

The bill includes a major structural change that will cut billions in federal funding for most states’ basic food benefits, with a new requirement that most states will have to pay between 5 and 15 percent of SNAP benefits. This amounts to billions of dollars each year that states across the country would now be required to pay. If a state can’t or won’t make up for some or all of these massive federal cuts with tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in its budget, it will have to cut its SNAP program or it could opt out of the program altogether, terminating SNAP food assistance entirely in the state, including to households with young children.

If children lose SNAP, they will also experience harmful ripple effects in other child nutrition programs, such as free school meals and summer EBT, due to the loss of automatic eligibility that comes from receiving SNAP. To make up for the federal cuts and avoid cutting nutrition assistance as well as other priorities affecting young children, such as health care or education, state policymakers will need to either raise new revenue or rollback recent tax cuts to raise the funds needed to prevent harmful cuts.

TABLE 1
Nearly 2 Million Children Under 3 Years Old Lived in Food-Insecure Households, Thousands Across Every State
	Children Under 3 Years Old in Food-Insecure Households
State	Number	Share
Alabama	38,000		21%
Alaska	5,000		16%
Arizona	55,000		23%
Arkansas	21,000		20%
California	172,000		13%
Colorado	27,000		14%
Connecticut	17,000		15%
Delaware	5,000		16%
District of Columbia	3,000		11%
Florida	102,000		16%
Georgia	60,000		16%
Hawai‘i	6,000		13%
Idaho	14,000		19%
Illinois	45,000		10%
Indiana	45,000		17%
Iowa	15,000		12%
Kansas	16,000		14%
Kentucky	39,000		25%
Louisiana	35,000		20%
Maine	8,000		21%
Maryland	28,000		12%
Massachusetts	25,000		12%
Michigan	63,000		19%
Minnesota	32,000		14%
Mississippi	21,000		20%
Missouri	38,000		17%
Montana	5,000		14%
Nebraska	15,000		19%
Nevada	18,000		18%
New Hampshire	NA		NA
New Jersey	35,000		13%
New Mexico	16,000		22%
New York	95,000		14%
North Carolina	67,000		18%
North Dakota	6,000		17%
Ohio	59,000		14%
Oklahoma	29,000		20%
Oregon	19,000		15%
Pennsylvania	58,000		16%
Rhode Island	NA		NA
South Carolina	28,000		16%
South Dakota	5,000		14%
Tennessee	34,000		14%
Texas	237,000		19%
Utah	23,000		15%
Vermont	NA		NA
Virginia	36,000		11%
Washington	36,000		13%
West Virginia	11,000		18%
Wisconsin	27,000		15%
Wyoming	5,000		23%
Total	1,808,000		16%

Note: Sum does not equal total due to rounding. Counts are rounded to the nearest 1,000, and shares to the nearest whole number. “NA” refers to states whose sample size was too small to calculate reliable estimates. These estimates rely on ten years of data due to small sample sizes in many states. However, for the 13 states that had large enough sample sizes, their five-year estimates of the share of children under 3 in food-insecure households were similar to the ten-year estimates presented here.
Source: CBPP analysis of 2014-2023 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement

Topics: Food Assistance

New Findings From The Stone Age

I think Cosmos has found other evidence of burying tools with women, in the very early days. I remember posting something several months ago.

Tools buried with women challenge Stone Age stereotype

September 14, 2025 Velentina Boulter

Stone Age tools. Credit: University of York

Researchers have discovered that women and children were just as likely as men to be buried with stone tools at a Stone Age grave site, challenging the assumption that such tools were associated only with men.

Working with the Latvian National Museum of History, the team analysed artefacts and stone tools found in the Zvejnieki cemetery in Latvia – one of the largest Stone Age burial sites.

Zvejnieki cemetery was used for more than 5,000 years and contains over 330 graves.

The researchers focused their study on stone tools made from materials like flint and quartz, which date to between 7500 and 2500 BCE during the Neolithic period. These kinds of tools are often dismissed by researchers as utilitarian and uninteresting.

“The site in Latvia has seen numerous investigations of the skeletal remains and other types of grave goods, such as thousands of animal teeth pendants,” says Dr Aimée Little, from the University of York in the UK.

“A missing part of the story was understanding, with greater depth, why people gave seemingly utilitarian items to the dead.”

The researchers analysed the tools using a multiproxy approach which involved considering technological, spatial, depositional and geological information about the stone tools.

Despite the long-standing belief that women in the Stone Age played more of a domestic role, while men did the hunting, the analysis found that women were just as, if not more, likely to be buried with stone tools.

“Our findings overturn the old stereotype of “Man the Hunter” which has been a dominant theme in Stone Age studies, and has even influenced, on occasion, how some infants have even been sexed, on the basis that they were given lithic tools,” says Little.

The results also showed that children were the most likely age group to have been buried with these tools. The full analysis of the burial site has been published in PLOS One.

The researchers suggest that these stone tools must have played a more significant role in Stone Age society than previously assumed.

While some of the tools discovered were used to work animal hides, others seemed to have been specifically made and then broken – almost as though they were a part of a mourning ceremony or ritual.

“This research demonstrates that we cannot make these gendered assumptions and that lithic grave goods played an important role in the mourning rituals of children and women, as well as men,” says Dr Anđa Petrović from the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Previous studies have uncovered similar traditions of deliberately breaking tools before burying them with the deceased across the eastern Baltic region, suggesting some sort of shared ritual tradition. Comparable funerary practices have also been observed in graves from a similar time period in Finland.

“The study highlights how much more there is to learn about the lives – and deaths – of Europe’s earliest communities, and why even the seemingly simplest objects can unlock insights about our shared human past and how people responded to death,” says Little.

Originally published by Cosmos as Tools buried with women challenge Stone Age stereotype

This Was In The News September 10th-

I saw a few headlines about it on Monday, and meant to post it but didn’t get it done, then Tuesday was what it was. So, it’s been a week, but here it is: there is universal childcare in New Mexico, and they are heroes for getting that done. -A

New Mexico will be the first state to make child care free

Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. Meet Chabeli and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

In an unprecedented move, New Mexico is making child care free.

Beginning in November, it will be the first state in the nation to provide child care to all residents regardless of income, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced this week.

The state has been working to lower child care care costs since 2019, when it created the Early Childhood Education and Care Department and started to expand eligibility for universal child care. This latest change removes income eligibility requirements from the state’s child care assistance program altogether and waives all family copayments.

The initiative is expected to save families $12,000 per child annually.

“Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” Lujan Grisham said in her announcement. “By investing in universal child care, we are giving families financial relief, supporting our economy, and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to grow and thrive.”

The United States allocates some federal funding to states to lower the cost of child care for low-income kids, but eligibility for that funding is very limited and by and large, most families are paying an average of $13,000 on child care annually. It’s much higher in many states.

In the absence of a federal universal child care system, some states have worked to build their own systems, and New Mexico has been a leader in that effort over the past several years.

The state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department got a budget increase of $113 million in the most recent legislative session, taking its total operating budget to nearly $1 billion. Half of that money goes specifically to child care payment support.

The state also established a fund in 2020 with money earmarked for early childhood education. Thanks to tax collections from the oil and gas industries, the fund has grown from $320 million to $10 billion. Latinas in New Mexico led the charge in 2022 to help pass a constitutional amendment in 2022 that ensured a portion of that fund went specifically to universal child care. Funding for the new initiative will come at least in part from there, and Lujan Grisham will also be requesting an additional $120 million in state funding next year, a spokesperson for the governor said.

The news also comes with improvements for child care facilities and, potentially, raises for their staff. As part of the rollout, the state will establish a $13 million loan fund to construct and expand facilities, launch a recruitment campaign for home-based providers and incentivize programs to pay staff a minimum of $18 an hour.

The state hopes the initiative will lead to the creation of 55 new child care centers and 1,120 home-based child care options.

Still, response to the initiative so far has been mixed. Republican state Rep. Rebecca Dow told the Albuquerque Journal that she believes child care vouchers should be reserved for children most at risk for child abuse and neglect. Since the state’s child care assistance program expanded eligibility over the past five years, fewer low-income families have participated in the program, the Journal reported.

But Thora Walsh Padilla, the president of the Mescalero Apache Tribe, praised the initiative, saying during a press conference Monday that it addresses various challenges the tribe has struggled with, including raising wages for providers. There are only three child care facilities on the 463,000 acre reservation.

“It is so timely and it answers so many needs,” she said. “A building? Oh my goodness, we’ll be one of the first to apply.”

R.E.M. – Everybody Hurts (Official HD Music Video)

Sorry struggling to function. Spent the entire morning barely watching news unable to deal with everything. Decided to instead do what I enjoy. I took one of my computers apart to check it, and did a clean on both. I wish I could explain. Hugs.

Charlie Kirk was a hate monger who vilified and called for the violent erasure of anyone not a white cis straight Christian males.

https://www.tumblr.com/reagan-was-a-horrible-president/794532109097353216/we-must-not-posthumously-sanitize-charlie-kirks

Things I don’t tell Mom

There was a time, long ago before my eyes starting going bad and when foolishness was that bit of mischief all of us get into whether someone is there to see it or not, and that our parents secretly laugh about because it was the same stuff they did.

I was Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp with my bb-gun. No, I didn’t have a Red Rider, I had a Crossman! And, I was a wiz, the terror of chipmunks everywhere. And, of course, me and my friend Benny had bb-gun fights, but we had a rule: no shooting in the face.

Some of you who have read my past writings are not surprised by this, but some of you may for the first time realize that yes, the boy is that dumb. And you have also recognized that this is, yes, another post on the demise of Charlie Kirk by someone who mistakenly believed a gun would solve his problems.

As I grew older I advanced my gun ownership advanced to a Marlin 22, then later to an older 30-06. I liked guns – until one day I realized that gun could solve all my problems, all my days of hatred, loneliness, my want to be different than what I was. One simple pull of one simple finger…

Dad talks of a time when he was in school and was part of an after-school gun club. He would get on the school bus with his gun and take it to school for his after hours activities. I remember when I took my hunter safety courses as a kid. Guns then were a tool; it was how we went hunting, sport targets, and in extreme moments perhaps, personal safety. Somehow they have gone beyond this. Now there are magazines by the truck-load telling us how we need a personal protection weapon as they peddle fear. Our politicians aren’t talking about how we need to deal with the issues that people think they need a gun to help them, but how they have the right to guns and how great and cool guns are.

I guess I’m a horrible person, because I just couldn’t really care less that Kirk is gone. He wasn’t an innocent by any stretch of the word. He advocated hate, he advocated second-class citizenry for those he didn’t like, he advocated for the right of the government to limit the rights of others that he didn’t like, and he even advocated for the loss of life so the importance of keeping his gun rights could be underscored. He advocated for the very scenerio that took his life, in a crushing bit of sad irony.

Who I do care about are those small children in that Catholic School who were shot while praying. No one flew them home on Air Force 2. I didn’t see Cenk Uygur crying for them! I didn’t the sitting republican party politicians calling out in outrage. I didn’t see fucking drumpf demanding retribution for the victims of the Colorado High School that happened that very same day! Somehow seeing one of their own shot was a bridge too far and little innocent children was not. And now, seeing that the shooter was a cis white male maga son of a cop, there went their favorite scape-goat that he was a plant of the Democrats.

But, evidently the nra checks cleared because I’m not seeing any hopeful measures to limit guns to ANYONE! Oh, let me take that back – drumpf wants to limit guns to the Trans community. Haven’t heard from the nra about the atrocity of such a statement yet…?

I once asked myself just what it would take before our children and young people became more important than our guns. I wondered what would it finally be to get people to demand that there be no more. Then I realized that the fear, the anger, the hatred that has been generated has just made us all tense and numb to it all; we are forlorn to the realization that it will never change because those in power are all too willing to sacrifice everything we care deeply about and even one of their corrupt mouthpieces to the money and power that death brings them.

MAGA Republicans Turn On Trump Over Epstein Cover-Ups

New Yorkers Are FED UP With Trump’s Secret Police

Reblogging A Reblog-

Yes, it will be 2 more clicks. Trust me, you’ll be better for the clicking!

Reblog

Well, Hell’s Bells. It’s An Assassination.

I wish peace and comfort to those who love him, and I hope his workplaces treat his family right financially.

Trump Ally Charlie Kirk Shot and Killed Shortly After Discussing Trans Mass Shooters

The co-founder of Turning Point USA was launching a tour with a stop at Utah Valley University.

Charlie Kirk, a far-right agitator and political activist, was shot and killed on Wednesday according to video of the incident and confirmation by Andrew Kolvet, Kirk’s spokesman.

“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.”

Kirk, who has built a following engaging in debates on college campuses around various political and social issues, was shot at Utah Valley University. Kirk, who is the executive director of Turning Point USA, was there to launch The American Comeback Tour at the school.

“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked Kirk, who was sitting under a tent, according to a video of the event. Kirk often hosts his events under a tent in the campus quad.

“Too many,” Kirk responded. Though the conversation continued, moments later a gunshot can be heard in video footage and Kirk slumps in his seat. The exchange occurred about two minutes into the event, according to Deseret News.

No suspect is in custody according to a spokesperson from the university. Following the shooting, UVU advised students on campus to “secure in place until police officers can escort you safely off campus.” The roads to the campus were also closed. (snip-MORE)

https://www.them.us/story/charlie-kirk-shot-killed-trans-turning-point-trump