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Increasing numbers of District parents are battling the disheartening challenge of providing their children with healthy meals due to increasingly expensive food prices, as revealed in a new survey released by No Kid Hungry, a national campaign working to eradicate childhood hunger across America.
The public survey examines responses conducted by Ipsos, showing greater disparities for Black lower, and middle-class families while evaluating roughly 3,000 parents with children attending public schools. According to the survey, 68% of lower-income, and 58% of middle-income families reported increasing hardships in being able to afford enough food to feed their children over the recent year. Overwhelmingly, 93% of participating parents of middle incomes, along with 87 % percent of parents with lower incomes shared the rising costs of food prices as the primary reason for this issue.
The numbers are daunting, as a USDA 2021 report emphasizes the large gap of over 22% percent of Black households with children experiencing food insecurity at almost three times the rates of White households with children, averaging at almost 8%.
Many of the surveyed families are skipping meals to ration enough money for other household needs, causing a large portion of middle-income families to utilize food assistance programs for the first time.
“It kept me at ease that at least my kids are eating properly, as inflation rises it is getting harder for me to keep up,” a middle-income father shared on the survey.