1 in 5 moms are going hungry so their kids don’t have to

My son was born in 2005. His father and I were in our early twenties, living in a two-bedroom apartment we’d found for just under $1,000 a month — which, even then, felt like a stretch. He worked early-morning meals-on-wheels routes, then spent his afternoons wrangling elementary schoolers at an after-school program so he could use his evenings to finish a graphic design degree. I taught yoga and managed the studio. Our schedules were stretched thin, our bank account stretched even thinner.

When our son arrived, we qualified for WIC. Milk, eggs, cereal, a few other basics which weren’t much, but definitely smoothed out the weeks when things were tight. I think about that a lot lately. About how we made it work, barely, twenty years ago. And about how a young family in our exact situation today with the same jobs, same hours, and same hustle would be navigating a completely different landscape. Accounting for grocery prices that have climbed relentlessly. Rents that double and triple what we paid, if you can even find housing to begin with. Astronomical payout at the pump. And most terrifying, a social safety net that is being actively dismantled. When I try to picture it, I feel something that lives somewhere between rage and grief, with a tightness that catches my breath. 

I’m not alone in that feeling. A new nationwide poll conducted by Aspect Strategic on behalf of Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign makes it quantifiably, undeniably clear: moms across this country are struggling to feed their families, and making sacrifices no mother should ever have to make.

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What the new food insecurity data actually shows

The poll surveyed 1,508 women raising children under 18, conducted in March 2026. Sixty-one percent said the 2020s is the most challenging decade in recent history to raise children in the United States. Another 29% said raising children has simply always been difficult. That leaves almost no one saying things are fine which tracks, because inarguably, things are not fine.

More than two in five moms — 43% — worry about whether they can consistently provide their children with healthy meals. One in four took on debt in the past 12 months to make sure their kids were fed. Twenty-three percent worked extra hours or took on additional jobs. And one in five skipped a meal or ate less herself so her child could eat.

Let that one sit for a second. One in five mothers in the United States is going without food so her child doesn’t have to know there’s a problem. In 2026. In the wealthiest country in the world. One. In. Five.

“That number doesn’t surprise me — but it still stops me every time I read it,” says Lillian Singh, Senior Vice President of Family Economic Mobility at Share Our Strength. “One in five moms. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a pattern, and it has a name: maternal sacrifice as a survival strategy. What we hear from moms through our partners, through the families we serve every day, is that skipping meals is often one of the first things a mom does when money gets tight. She eats less so her child doesn’t have to know there’s a problem. That instinct is love. But it’s also a signal of a system that has failed to hold her.”

Among lower-income moms, the numbers are more severe: one in three accrued debt, skipped meals, delayed bill payments, or turned to family and community resources like food pantries. One in five cut back on their own medical care, including prescriptions, to keep their kids fed. But this is not only a low-income story. Middle-income families are feeling the squeeze too. The poll found that moms across all income levels are making trade-offs and while the degree of desperation varies, the worry is nearly universal.

“For millions of moms, the math simply isn’t adding up,” said Anne Filipic, CEO of Share Our Strength. “No mom should have to take on debt or skip meals and medical care just to make sure their kids have food.”

And yet, despite all of it, 78% of moms say they are optimistic about their children’s futures. That number is both moving and complicated. Hope isn’t the same thing as having enough. But moms are holding both, and doing it under conditions that should embarrass us as a society.

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One mom’s experience navigating SNAP and food insecurity

Tafra Jones is 48, lives in Washington State, and has a combined ten children with her fiancé — ranging in age from 16 to 30 — plus foster children and grandchildren in her care at any given time. She has been fostering for over five years, specifically welcoming kids with behavioral health needs. Kids she’s watched waiting in ERs and ambulance bays for treatment or an inpatient bed. “Those are the kiddos I bring into my home,” she says.

She works 70 hours a week. Her fiancé handles the cooking. On Sundays, Tafra does all the shopping and meal prep. It’s a carefully orchestrated operation that accounts for food allergies across multiple kids, varying ages, and a budget built largely around SNAP benefits. There are weeks she accounts for two separate meals at the same time to accommodate different dietary needs. When a family emergency upended one Sunday, her fallback was homemade pizza dough she keeps in the freezer. Systems, she’ll tell you, are everything.

When SNAP benefits run out before the end of the month, which they often do, Tafra leans on community gardens for fresh vegetables and on salmon fishing trips her kids take as both a practical contribution and a connection to their Warm Springs tribal heritage, which her family has reclaimed and deepened over the past three years. “They feel like that’s their contribution to providing the meat for the family,” she says.

“I will go hungry to make sure every kid that’s in my care is eating. I have done that more than once. And to me, it’s okay, because I know that my kids are not gonna go hungry. Because I was hungry as a child growing up.” — Tafra Jones

Tafra is also well aware of the assumptions people bring to conversations about food assistance. “A lot of people think that we just buy junk food with SNAP benefits. And we don’t. Moms are really, really looking every day to make sure their kids have even peanut butter and jelly on the table. Or toast. They have yogurt.” Fresh produce, she notes, is often simply out of reach. It’s too expensive, too quickly gone. “I wish that fresh fruits and vegetables were cheaper, or that SNAP benefits would increase, so that families could be able to feed their kids healthier foods.”

Navigating the system is its own ordeal. Tafra describes an application process that can mean sitting on hold for two to three hours — sometimes six — only to get disconnected. Benefits require renewal every three months, and missing a deadline means getting cut off. Online access is a barrier for some communities; in-person means transportation. “It was easier when my older kids were little,” she says. “Now I see it’s harder for families to have access.” And she’s seen how the current political climate has made things worse. “It’s harder to qualify. It’s harder to keep your benefits. They’re trying to completely cut families off.”

The judgment compounds everything. Tafra names it directly: the assumptions made by people in the community and sometimes by workers within the system itself. “New moms that are just needing help — it makes them feel like, why try? When I’m just gonna get humiliated.”

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Tafra as advocate: ‘I’m right here. I can help you.’

What makes Tafra’s story exceptional isn’t just what she has navigated. It’s what she does with that knowledge. As a parent partner, she actively reaches out to parents she sees struggling. She connects them with resources, walks them through the system, and offers the kind of guidance that no form or automated phone line can provide. Her own kids have absorbed this ethos so thoroughly that she jokes, half-seriously, that she got into fostering because her children kept bringing friends home with the promise that their mom would advocate for them.

“I want kids to be able to be heard and seen,” she says. “If they’re not eating, their behaviors are out of control. Their sleep is out of control. They cannot focus in school.” She understands, viscerally, the downstream consequences of hunger, not as a policy abstraction but as something she has lived and continues to live.

She includes her kids in grocery shopping, in meal prep, in cooking. She uses picture books and kids’ cookbooks. She teaches them that any leftover can become an omelet. Nothing gets thrown out. “Including them in the kitchen is huge,” she says, “because otherwise, they don’t know.” She is building something in her home that goes far beyond feeding her family. She’s teaching a generation of children, many of them kids the system had already started to give up on, that they are worth feeding, that food is a right, that someone will show up for them.

Her message to other moms caught in the system, ashamed or exhausted or too beaten down to try again: “It is definitely worth knowing that you have the right to SNAP programs, to help feed your family, to take the stress and burden off you. Find an advocate. Find somebody. Find a parent who’s been through it.”

And her greatest hope for the children who have moved through her home? “That they continue this advocacy work. That my kids have a great future, and they all know, even the ones that have come into my care, and then have gone, that they will never go hungry, and they have every right to the food that they need. No childhood should ever go hungry. For any reason. There is no reason there should not be food for children.”

Related:

What moms say they need: Food access, housing, and support

The poll found that 91% of moms say at least one additional support would help them feel more confident their children can thrive. More than half pointed to easy access to healthy, affordable food (55%) and affordable housing (54%). Nearly half said a more stable income would help (47%). Almost all moms — 93% — agreed with the statement “I make sacrifices so my children can thrive.” More than half agreed strongly.

Singh points to the expansion of summer meals programs as evidence of what’s possible when programs are designed around how families actually live rather than what’s administratively convenient. When No Kid Hungry started, only one in seven kids who received school meals during the year was getting meals over the summer. Meals had to be eaten on-site, at set hours, often far from home, which is clearly an impossible ask for working parents and families in rural areas. Feedback from families led to new approaches including more flexible pick-up options and additional EBT funds for groceries. Today, nearly 19 million kids receive summer meal benefits, compared to 3 million just a few years ago.

“When we stay rooted in the lived experiences of the families we serve, we can design programs that better meet their needs,” Singh says. “And implement those programs at scale.”

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The policy environment right now is moving in the opposite direction. SNAP, which serves 42 million Americans including nearly 16 million children, faces proposed cuts that advocates say would be catastrophic. Singh puts it plainly. “Proposed SNAP cuts don’t just reduce a benefit. They remove the floor that makes those small acts of sacrifice survivable. Without that floor, sacrifice becomes freefall.”

Tafra is equally direct about what she wants from the people who make these decisions. “I would ask lawmakers to continue to fund SNAP, and raise it for the cost of living in certain states and certain areas,” she says. “There are certain senators and governors that just don’t care. They don’t understand it. They’ve never lived it. They’ve never gone hungry, I’m sure. I would love to encourage them to live on the budget that their constituents live on. And tell me how that feels.”

Singh points to an expanded Child Tax Credit as another lever that could be transformational. When it was temporarily expanded in 2021, it helped millions of families afford food, rent, and childcare, and cut child poverty nearly in half. That expansion was allowed to lapse.

Meanwhile, No Kid Hungry has helped unlock nearly $350 million in child tax credits for families, supported 13,000 single mothers through programs that increased incomes and removed barriers to food access, and reached 1.2 million people with efforts to shift the narrative around single moms. Fourteen million kids in the U.S. are living with hunger today. That is not an inevitability. It is a choice — one policymakers are making, and one we can unmake.

Twenty years ago, WIC helped my family. It wasn’t glamorous. It was a few essentials and a little less to worry about. Every family deserves a floor. The question is whether we’re going to keep it there.

How to help families facing food insecurity

Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign has a “Because of Moms” pledge, which connects supporters with stories from mothers across the country and actionable ways to advocate for families facing food insecurity. Sign the pledge at nokidhungry.org.

If you or someone you know may qualify for SNAP or WIC, benefits.gov is a starting point for finding programs by state. Feeding America’s locator at feedingamerica.org can help you find local food banks and community meal programs near you.

Sources: No Kid Hungry / Aspect Strategic nationwide poll of 1,508 mothers, conducted March 10-16, 2026; No Kid Hungry press release, April 28, 2026. Interviews conducted by the author with Tafra Jones and Lillian Singh, SVP of Family Economic Mobility, Share Our Strength.

source https://www.mother.ly/parenting/moms-food-insecurity-snap-no-kid-hungry/