Backpack programs and the crisis narrative of child hunger-A critical review of the rationale, targeting, and potential benefits and harms of an expanding but untested model of practice

Abstract

In recent years, school-based food backpack programs (BPPs) have come into national prominence as a response to a perceived crisis of child hunger in America. Distributing bags of free food directly to schoolchildren for their own personal consumption each weekend, BPPs bring together private donors, faith communities, and public schools around an intuitively appealing project: children are hungry, and so we give them food. Perhaps because of their intuitive appeal, BPPs have expanded rapidly, without rigorous evaluation to determine their impacts on children, families, and schools. This Perspective aims to open up thinking about BPPs, first articulating the implicit conceptual model that undergirds BPPs, drawing on documentation offered by major program providers and on our own experience working with several schools implementing BPPs, to provide a window into what BPPs do and how and why they do it.We focus in particular on how the crisis narrative of child hunger has shaped the BPP model and on the related interplay between public sympathy and the neoliberal climate in which structural solutions to family poverty are eschewed. We then assess the BPP model in light of existing knowledge, concluding that BPPs fit poorly with the needs of the majority of children living in foodinsecure households in the United States and consequently put children at risk of negative consequences associatedwithworry, shame, stigma, and disruptions to family functioning. Finally, we provide recommendations for practice and research, emphasizing the importance of 1) responding to children's actual needs throughout program implementation, 2) avoiding unnecessary risks by effective targeting of services to only those children who need them, and 3) rigorously evaluating program outcomes and unintended consequences to determine whether, even for the small number of US children who experience hunger, the benefits of the BPP model outweigh its psychosocial costs.