Session: SNAP, Food Insecurity, and Child Maltreatment: Evidence on the Role of Nutrition Assistance across Populations and Policy Contexts (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest federal nutrition assistance program in the United States, serving millions of households with children. In recent years, SNAP has undergone substantial policy changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including expansions in benefit levels, administrative flexibility, and eligibility. These shifts provide a timely opportunity to examine how evolving nutrition assistance policies shape child and family well-being. While growing evidence suggests SNAP functions as a protective factor, key questions remain regarding the consistency of this evidence, the consequences of benefit changes, underlying mechanisms, and whether these protective effects extend equitably across populations. This symposium presents four papers addressing these questions using complementary methods and recent policy contexts.

The first paper provides a systematic review of the empirical literature on SNAP and child maltreatment. Synthesizing findings from ten studies, the review shows that more generous SNAP policies—including expanded eligibility and reduced administrative barriers—are consistently associated with lower rates of child protective services investigations, substantiated maltreatment, and foster care entries, with the strongest protective effects observed for neglect. The review also finds that administrative instability in benefit receipt may increase maltreatment risk. This paper establishes the symposium’s conceptual foundation by demonstrating that SNAP policy design matters for child welfare outcomes.

Building on this foundation, the second paper examines the child welfare consequences of SNAP policy retrenchment. Using nationwide county-level data linked to state variation in the timing of SNAP Emergency Allotment (EA) expiration, the study applies a difference-in-differences design to estimate changes in substantiated child maltreatment. Findings indicate that EA expiration was associated with increases in substantiated maltreatment and neglect, with effects that grew over time, showing that the protective role of nutrition assistance is also evident in reverse.

The third paper turns to a likely mechanism: food insufficiency. Using nationally representative Household Pulse Survey data, the study finds that SNAP-EA expiration was associated with significant increases in food insufficiency among SNAP-recipient households, with the most pronounced effects among lower-income families and those experiencing housing instability. These findings clarify how benefit reductions may intensify material hardship among families facing structural disadvantage and provide a lens for understanding conditions associated with heightened child welfare risk.

The fourth paper adds an equity perspective by examining whether SNAP expansions during COVID-19 reduced food insecurity equitably across children of immigrants and children in U.S.-born families. Using a triple-difference design, the study finds that SNAP EA effects for children of immigrants were substantially smaller. When analyses were restricted to SNAP-eligible households, these disparities disappeared, suggesting that unequal access rather than differential effectiveness accounts for the gap.

Taken together, these papers provide timely evidence on SNAP's role in promoting child and family well-being—moving from evidence synthesis, to consequences of policy withdrawal, to material hardship as a pathway, to inequities in policy reach. Collectively, the findings suggest that SNAP is an important component of the social policy infrastructure supporting family stability and child maltreatment prevention, with implications for ongoing debates about benefit adequacy, accessibility, and inclusive eligibility.