323 - The Association Between Food Insecurity and Child Developmental Milestone Achievement in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Poster Number: 323
Publication Number: 323.1698

Background: Food insecurity has deleterious impacts on early childhood development. Emerging evidence suggests the COVID-19 pandemic may also have negatively affected young children’s development. Children in families with food insecurity might have been particularly vulnerable to developmental delays, but this has not been studied.

Objective: The objective of this analysis was to investigate the association between household food insecurity and developmental milestone achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic among US children 0-5 years.

Design/Methods: Data were from Child Health and Development Interactive System (CHADIS), a primary care web-based clinical process support platform. Participants were US children 0-5 years born at term. Multilevel mixed effects linear regression was used to examine the association between household food insecurity (FI) pre-pandemic (July 2018-October 2019) or intra-pandemic (July 2020-October 2021) and intra-pandemic Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ), a validated developmental screen, age-standardized domain score, controlling for age, sex, and pre-pandemic ASQ score.

Results: 7458 intra-pandemic ASQs from 2968 children in 14 US states were included. 279 children had persistent FI (pre- and intra-), 331 children had new FI (intra- but not pre-), 73 children had resolved FI (pre- but not intra), and 6775 children never (neither pre nor intra) had FI (Table 1). Children with persistent FI had significantly lower communication, fine motor, and personal-social age-standardized ASQ domain scores than children who never had FI. However, there were no significant differences for children with new intra-pandemic FI or resolved FI, compared to children who never had FI (Table 2).

Conclusion(s): Persistent FI, but not new or resolved FI during the pandemic, was associated with decreased early childhood communication, fine motor, and personal-social developmental milestone achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further research is needed to determine mechanisms for developmental delay as well as whether resolving families’ food insecurity improves early childhood development.