E215: When Kids Age Out of WIC Support

The third largest food assistance program in the United States is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC for short. WIC is designed to safeguard the health of low-income women, infants, and children up to the age of five who are at risk of inadequate nutrition. WIC provides funds for specific foods to supplement diets, information on healthy eating, and referrals to healthcare. However, regardless of school attendance and access to school meals, children age out of the program the month after their fifth birthday. Today, I am talking with the University of Georgia's Travis Smith, an agricultural economist who, along with his co-author, Pourya Valizedah studied the effects of aging out of WIC on children's diets.

Interview Summary

Before we discuss your recent paper, why did you decide to study aging out of WIC?

There's been a lot of work on pregnant and postpartum women participants of the WIC program, and also infants, and all of that research is definitely very important. There's been less work on child participants, and one thing we were interested in was this arbitrary rule about kids losing access to WIC in the month after they turned five years old. We knew that this rule was set up because most kids start school when they turn five, although it's not WHEN they turn five. Some previous work that I had done with my co-author Pourya on school foods, we knew that school foods really impact kids' diet quality in a positive way. We were interested in what happens to some of these kids that have this potentially long gap in their food assistance.

It's really fascinating to learn that there was a lot of research in this space on WIC oriented to mothers, and it sounds like what you're saying, little or not as much was focused on children. I'm interested to understand why do you think that's the case given the orientation of this program?

That's a great question. I think there's probably two ways to look at this. I think the most important is that most people would consider pregnant women and infancy the most vulnerable times of your life, and so understanding how the program impacts the most vulnerable would be of first order importance. Also, some of the early work that came out in the 1980s when people started really looking into the efficacy of WIC, focused on birth weights, for example, and you see that WIC's impact on low birth weights far outweighs the cost of WIC itself. For example, we're talking about women that live in low-income households, so in most cases, when these women go to give birth they most likely might be on Medicaid. Any outcome that would be a negative outcome or an adverse outcome at birth would be paid for through Medicaid. That was the first place that people looked, and that's when researchers realized very quickly that WIC is paying for itself just on the women participants and the child participants together at birth. There is definitely other research on children, it's just not as much research.

That's great. Let's go ahead and dig into the paper that was recently published in the American Journal for Agricultural Economics. What's the upshot? What did you find?

The upshot is that it seems like that WIC does work in terms of providing nutritious foods to the child participants. These are kids that are two, three, and four years old. One reason that that's important is that we know as kids age, the probability that they stay on WIC, even when they're eligible, declines dramatically. For example, at birth, as I mentioned earlier, I think the take-up rate is over 95%. That is because postpartum, immediately after birth, medical providers will give a screener at the hospital and if they see that Moms are eligible for WIC, they'll ask if you want to sign up. Part of the WIC package is to get free infant formula if the mother doesn't want to breastfeed or she's partially breastfeeding. So, you see a large uptake at that point. But then after the kid turns one and the package switches to milk and cereal and fruits and vegetables, that's where we start to see parents and caregivers not re-certify the children. Over time, by the time you get to four-year-olds, you're looking at, out of all the four-year-olds that are eligible, depends on what