Food insecurity in America is real, with over 12.7 percent (15.8 million) of U.S. households in 2015 uncertain of having, or unable to acquire enough food to feed their families due to not having enough money or other resources to buy food.
But the interesting thing about the statistics on food insecurity is that in almost all cases, teenagers are not singled out as a separate group, instead being lumped in with the phrase “children under the age of 18 years.” The Urban Institute took a closer look at teens in families that are struggling with food insecurity.
The report covers interviews with poor teenagers, who also happen to be food consumers and decision makers, in 10 communities across the country. The report found that as older children or young adults, regardless of how they are described, most all of the teenagers reacted to hunger like the adults in the family, ignoring their own hunger just to be sure that younger siblings had food.
In all the focus groups in the report, the teenagers described girls “selling their body” or “sex for money” as one way to make ends meet. For boys desperate for food, it was turning to either shoplifting or selling drugs. This sounds like going to extreme measures, but often overlooked is the fact that teenagers, in general, often hide their true feelings, and hungry teens are no exception.
“Teens feel more bad about [hunger] because they have more insecurities about themselves,” said a teenage boy in San Diego. “Poor kids are the outcasts. People [are] nasty to you.”
Quite often, the report points out, because of their own insecurities, teens turn down help from teachers, neighbors and other well-intentioned community groups. So with a parent or parents working to put some sort of food on the table, and little food in the house, they hide their own hunger and look to other ways to help feed the family.
“People have to do other things,” a teenage boy in Illinois told the authors. “They do what they have to do to survive because not everyone can go out and get a job.”
A male teenager in Chicago talks about shoplifting in a grocery store, saying: “I ain’t talking about robbing nobody. I’m just talking like going there and get what you need, just hurry up and walk out, which I do … They didn’t even know. If you need to do that, that’s what you got to do, that’s what you got to do.”
Susan Popkin, the lead author of the report, “Impossible Choices,” says the findings are “new and shocking.” She told the Guardian, “The level of desperation that it implies was really shocking to me. It’s a situation I think is just getting worse over time.”
The Urban Institute says their research shows that about 6.8 million 10- to-17-year-olds are food-insecure, with at least 2.9 million being categorized as having “very low food security.”
The study points out a small subset of teens in the study are making “risky decisions in big and small communities alike because family poverty has increased, working-class wages have stalled, and cash assistance from government programs has wilted.” This is a reflection on priorities Congress has set, which is focusing more on the younger children in poverty, say the researchers.
