Food Insecurity and the Nexus of Co-Occurring Parental Distress and Child Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior Problems

Parental psychological distress and children’s internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems could co-occur rather than operate independently, yet it remains unclear whether the likelihood of such co-occurrence varies by levels of food insecurity. By examining these co-occurring challenges in the context of food insecurity, this study aims to clarify the extent to which the alleviation of food insecurity could reduce the co-occurrence of parental psychological distress and child internalizing and externalizing behaviors. Using the 2019 and 2020 data waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (N = 1,196), this study firstly conducts a latent profile analysis to investigate heterogeneity of co-occurrence patterns. Next, this study utilizes a multinomial logistic regression model to investigate the impacts of food insecurity on the risk of different co-occurrence patterns. To address selection bias, generalized propensity score weighting is applied to ensure demographic characteristics are similar to each other across different food insecurity levels (i.e., non-significant difference). Results show that, compared to families living with low/very low food insecurity, families living with high food security experience lower risk of co-occurrence of parental psychological distress and child internalizing and externalizing problematic behaviors (relative risk ratio = 0.41, p < 0.05). For practical implications, these findings suggest that lower risk of the co-occurrence of psychological distress in parents as well as internalizing and externalizing behavioral difficulties in children are more likely to be observed among families living with high food security.