The association between children’s reported access to food and their subjective well-being: A cross-national perspective

Food insecurity is a major global concern among both economically developed and developing countries, raising issues around the physical and mental health of adults and children. Several studies have shown an association between childhood food insecurity and poor mental health, but this was rarely explored in regard to positive well-being indicators and from a cross-national perspective. The current study aims to fill this gap using data from the third wave of the Children’s Worlds Survey, focusing on the sample of 48,000 ten-year-old children from 34 countries. We explore the association between access to food using four subjective well-being measures (OLS, SWBS, feeling happy, and feeling sad), controlling for gender and Deprivation Scale. We found that even occasional limited access to food is associated with lower subjective well-being in all types of measures and that it is quite widespread, in both economically developed and undeveloped countries. Our multilevel analysis shows that access to food affects subjective well-being beyond the effect of economic status and that the strength of the association varies across countries as is indicated by the significance of the random slope models. That is, in some countries, the effect of not always having access to food on subjective well-being is much higher than in others. For example, the correlation in India is insignificant (r = 0.046), while in Russia it is significant (r = 0.396). Finally, we discuss the implications for children’s well-being and countries’ policies in the context of food insecurity, referring to the importance of child food insecurity alleviation programs, and the importance of monitoring any level of food insecurity, both internationally and locally.