 A journal article in this month's Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine reports that "between the ages of 1 to 20 years, nearly half (49.2%) of all American children will, at some point, reside in a household that receives food stamps. Households in need of the program use it for relatively short periods but are also likely to return to the program at several points during the childhood years. Race, parental education, and head of household's marital status exert a strong influence on the proportion of children residing in a food stamp household."The authors used thirty years of longitudinal data to calculate an estimation of the risk of food stamp use and poverty during childhood. They concluded that American children are at a high risk of encountering a spell during which their families are in poverty and food insecure as indicated through their use of food stamps. Such events have the potential to seriously jeopardize a child's overall health, malnutrition being only one of the health risks. FRAC president James Weill said the study shows that "there are just very large numbers of people who rely on this program for a month, six months, a year. What I hope comes out of this study is an understanding that food stamp beneficiaries aren't them – they're us."
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