The effect of food insecurity and stress on delay discounting across families: a COVID-19 natural experiment

BACKGROUND: Delay Discounting is the extent to which one prioritizes smaller immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards. The ability to prospect into the future is associated with better health decision-making, which suggests that delay discounting is an important intervention target for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease. Delay discounting decreases throughout development and stressful experiences, particularly those that accompany poverty, may influence this developmental trajectory. The current study leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic downturn as a natural experiment to understand how changes in food insecurity and psychological stress may associated with changes in delay discounting among parents, adolescents, and children. METHODS: A stratified cohort of families (N = 76 dyads), established prior to the initial pandemic lockdowns, were asked to complete a follow-up survey in the summer of 2020, during reopening. Thirty-seven (49%) families had an older adolescent (aged 15 – 18 years) in the study and 39 (51%) had an elementary aged child (aged 7 – 12 years) in the follow-up study. Both data collection points included measurements of economic position, psychological stress, food security status, and delay discounting. RESULTS: The results showed that pandemic food insecurity was associated with greater stress among parents (β = 2.22, t(65.48) = 2.81, p = 0.007). Parents, Adolescents, and children significantly differed in their response to psychological stress during the pandemic (β = -0.03, t(102.45) = -2.58, p = 0.011), which was driven by a trend for children to show greater delay discounting associated with an increase in psychological stress during the pandemic (β = -0.01, p = 0.071), while adolescents and parents showed no change. CONCLUSIONS: These findings add to the evidence that food insecurity is uniquely stressful among parents with no effects on delay discounting. Despite this, we found no evidence that food insecurity was stressful for child or adolescents. A trend in our data suggested that childhood, as compared with adolescence, may be an important developmental period for the association between stress and delay discounting. Future research should continue the longitudinal investigation of childhood stress and the developmental trajectory of delay discounting to ascertain how these effects may persist in adulthood. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-022-13969-1.