BY REBECCA PUTTERMAN
Childhood hunger and malnutrition is not a thing of the past.
One in five children in North Carolina go hungry, according to the Food Effect, an online advocacy network sponsored by the N.C. Pork Council, and one in four children go hungry in the 34 counties served by the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.
“There are a lot of people who don’t realize this problem of hunger is so bad in North Carolina,” said Jennifer Caslin, marketing director for the Food Bank, based in Raleigh.
For the central and eastern counties served by the Food Bank, 545,000 individuals at or below the poverty level are at risk of hunger.
“They may or may not know where their next meals are coming from,” Caslin said.
Johnston County is one of those counties, and 34 percent of those 545,000 people are children.
Despite indications that the economy is in an uptick, Caslin said children are still experiencing the consequences of their parents’ foreclosures, employment insecurity and high gas prices.
“Those are kind of the main three issues that we’re seeing that people are dealing with a lot,” Caslin said. “Unemployment leads to a lot of other issues. Not having income really creates a lot of other problems.
At the Johnston County public health department, the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) is a federally-sponsored supplemental nutrition program for low-income mothers who are pregnant, postpartum and/or breastfeeding, as well as infants and children under the age of five.
The WIC program also has satellite clinics in Clayton and Benson. In eastern Wake County, residents work with WIC through the Eastern Regional Center.
“The WIC program focuses on getting good nutrition early for pregnant women and infants and children. That is important for proper development,” said health department director, Dr. Marilyn Pearson.
“Development wise, if we want to get the kids what they need early on, they can be successful later on in life and successful in school,” she said.
Undernourishment beginning in the womb can affect children developmentally. It can also affect classroom learning, Pearson said.
When children face a constant lack of nutrition, they lack the energy to concentrate, and their learning and focus can also be negatively impacted.
Four- and five year-olds who participate in WIC in early childhood have better vocabularies and digit memory scores than comparable children who do not participate in WIC, according to the state’s WIC web site.
“It affects their activity level in the classroom, but also at home,” Pearson said. “Medically, it may affect them in other ways. If they’re not getting enough of certain vitamins and minerals, they may have other medical issues that may come up.”
Pearson said the number of families qualifying for the program’s supplemental foods, breastfeeding supplies and professional nutrition counseling is increasing.
“With the economy the way it is, we’re having an increase in our caseload. We’re seeing a lot more children and families qualifying for our WIC program,” she said.
Action for Children of North Carolina is a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Raleigh. It aims to ensure that the state’s children are healthy, ecnomically secure, safe, and have the resources to succeed in their education.
In a report released in 2011, the nonprofit explored the impact of the Great Recession on the state’s children.
Like the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, Action for Children also found links between parental unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and the effects of that cycle of poverty on children.
“Children who experience economic hardship and excessive adversities early in life encounter toxic stress that disrupts circuits, damages the architecture of their developing brains and weakens the foundation for their future learning, health and earnings potential,” the report found.
Between 2007 and 2009, enrollment in the olf food stamp program, now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program increased 29 percent to 1.7 million recipients statewide.
One in three North Carolina children benefitted from SNAP at the end of the recession, up 23 percent from its start, the report said.
Early-childhood health and education programs have among the highest returns on investment of any social programs, according to the report.
Because of the “extremely high elasticity of young children’s brains,” children are especially receptive to their educational environments under the age of five, according to the report.
Children who receive high-quality early childhood education are more likely to graduate from high school, own a home, have savings, and commit fewer crimes than their peers, the report states.
And those are the positive aspects the Raleigh food bank hopes to focus on.
“The main thing we focus on is them getting an education,” Caslin said. “But if they’re hungry, they can’t focus in school, and that really affects their learning.”
The food bank’s “Kids Meals and More” programs includes afterschool tutoring and mentoring, weekend meals, and a summer meals program for students on free and reduced lunch.
“These programs don’t just offer them a meal. There’s a lot more to the program than just feeding the child,” Caslin said.
The food bank partners with churches and after school programs, both public and private, throughout the Triangle area.
“When it comes to children who are hungry, they may be lagging behind. We’ve really focused on feeding those kids so they don’t have to worry about where they get their next meal, no matter what that involves. They get nutrition education, physical activity, mentoring, homework help, and a safe place to stay during the summer,” Caslin said.
The food bank wants to expand those programs across their coverage area, including in Johnston County.
However, that would take a fair amount of community involvement and funding, Caslin explained, adding that they need to keep the programs that are already in place going strong.
“There are more and more kids each year that need our help,” Caslin said.
“The more kids that need our help, the more support we need from the community.”