When a child is admitted to the hospital, most people worry about test results, surgeries, medications, and whether the young patient will recover. Far fewer realize that many of the adults sitting beside those hospital beds are hungry.

A growing body of pediatric research is revealing a hidden consequence of childhood illness: Families already struggling to put food on the table often become even more food insecure once a child is hospitalized. Parents lose work, spend money on parking and transportation, sleep in uncomfortable chairs, and often skip meals because hospital food is too expensive or simply unavailable while they remain at their child’s bedside. For some families, the hospitalization itself creates a new crisis. For others, it deepens one that already existed.

Alarming Rise

In a recent commentary in Hospital Pediatrics, co-authored with LDI Associate Fellow Michael Luke, MD, MSHP, LDI Senior Fellow Aditi Vasan, MD, MSHP, notes, “Food insecurity rates are rising nationally, particularly among families with children. This is alarming because access to adequate and nutritious food is essential for children’s learning, growth, and development. Unfortunately, these rates are likely to worsen amid recent federal changes to government benefit programs. In particular, the 2025 Budget Reconciliation Act made changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that will (1) reduce federal funding and increase states’ cost-sharing requirements, (2) prevent future increases to SNAP benefit amounts in response to inflation, and (3) impose new work reporting requirements, including on caregivers of children age 14 and older.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the changes will reduce or eliminate SNAP benefits for about 300,000 recipients in an average month and separately reduce child nutrition benefits for about 96,000 children.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ SNAP Tracker estimates that more than 4 million people have left SNAP since H.R. 1 was enacted in July 2025, based on the latest available federal and state administrative data.

Vasan is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Luke is an Attending Physician at CHOP and an Instructor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine.

Continuing Research

The Hospital Pediatrics commentary represents the latest step in Vasan’s continuing research into pediatric food insecurity. Across a series of studies over the past decade, she has argued that hospitals should treat hunger as a health issue, recognize that caregivers often experience food insecurity alongside hospitalized children, and work with community organizations to build long-term systems that connect vulnerable families with food and other social supports.

In an LDI interview, Vasan recounted how she first became interested in researching inpatient caregiver food insecurity. “As a pediatric hospitalist, I once cared for a patient whose mother told me on the second day of their admission that she wanted to leave the hospital with her child immediately. Her child had been admitted with asthma and was still requiring frequent respiratory treatments with an inhaler, so they weren’t yet medically ready for discharge. When I asked why she wanted to leave right away, she told me that she hadn’t had anything to eat since her child was admitted. She didn’t have enough money to buy food from the hospital cafeteria. She wanted to take her child home so that she could eat.”

Hospital Cafeteria Vouchers

“Household food insecurity and inpatient food insecurity are both important needs, but the strategies for addressing them are different,” Vasan continued. “Families experiencing household food insecurity could benefit from referrals to community-based resources and government nutrition benefit programs like SNAP and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Families experiencing inpatient caregiver food insecurity could benefit from immediate food resources, such as vouchers that allow them to receive free or subsidized meals from the cafeteria. Screening for both household and inpatient food insecurity is critical to ensuring that all families can receive the support they need.”

“Many of my colleagues have similar stories,” she said. “Parents and other caregivers need to be nourished and supported in order to care for their children effectively.”

She emphasized that caregivers are not simply visitors. They are often essential members of the child’s care team, helping comfort frightened children, making medical decisions, monitoring symptoms, and communicating with physicians and nurses.

Future Research

“This is an important area for future research,” Vasan said. “While we don’t yet have evidence of how inpatient food insecurity impacts quality of care, we suspect that caregivers experiencing food insecurity during a hospitalization might be less able to care for and advocate for their children, which could lead to downstream impacts on health care quality and safety.”

In the Hospital Pediatrics commentary, she argues that children’s hospitals should move beyond simply screening families for food insecurity and providing referrals. Instead, hospitals should build active, well-funded partnerships with community-based organizations such as food banks, benefit enrollment groups, and social-service referral networks. Those partnerships should provide immediate help during hospitalization, connect families to food and benefits after discharge, track whether referrals actually result in services, and be evaluated for equity across language, insurance status, and neighborhood. She emphasizes that this model will require health system investment in community partners, stronger data-sharing systems, and advocacy for broader policies that protect families’ access to adequate nutrition.

Asked whether pediatric hospitals are likely over the next decade to deepen their connections to community-based food programs and treat caregiver hunger as an integral part of medical care rather than simply an unfortunate social problem, Vasan expressed guarded optimism.

“A growing number of pediatric hospitals are implementing social needs screening and resource navigation programs, recognizing that addressing household-level social needs is a critical part of providing effective medical care,” she said. “I hope that these efforts continue to expand. That said, I don’t think the responsibility for addressing caregiver and child hunger should fall on pediatric health systems alone. I also think it’s important that pediatric hospitals and pediatricians advocate for upstream policy changes that improve access to essential nutrition benefit programs like WIC and SNAP.”

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