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In order to reduce food insecurity a new approach to
In order to reduce food insecurity, a new approach to private emergency food assistance is needed. Traditional food pantries have become run like businesses, as they have expanded over the past three decades (Saul and Curtis, 2013). However, a business model of efficiency, and the typical outcomes of charity – measured by giving more bags of food to more people each year – can create a cycle of dependency that reduces self confidence in one’s ability to help oneself. It also fails to recognize the human elements of dignity and self-efficacy that factor into a person’s ability to be food secure. By relying on handouts from food pantries, food insecure individuals are not able to take an active role in choosing their food or work on other issues related to food insecurity, which undermines their self-efficacy (Poppendieck, 1998). More holistic pantries such as client-choice are designed to give autonomy, dignity and choice to clients when obtaining food.
Limitations
Implications for research and practice
A food pantry that is able to address the root causes of food insecurity, and help clients achieve long-term food security and self-sufficiency could prevent the negative physical and mental health consequences of food insecurity and provide a model for more effectively promoting buy betaxolol food security across the country (Robaina and Martin, 2013).
Introduction
Over the past decades there has been an increase in the mean age of childbearing across much of the developed world (OECD, 2014). In Sweden the mean age of first birth increased by approximately four years, to age 28, between 1970 and 2011, and in 2013 the majority of all births were to women aged 30 or older (Statistics Sweden). Research that has attempted to isolate the impact of maternal age at the time of birth on long-term offspring outcomes has generally shown a non-linear relationship where the children of younger and older mothers are shorter, have higher rates of obesity, lower self-rated health, higher mortality (Myrskylä & Fenelon, 2012), and higher rates of diabetes (Cardwell et al., 2010), and cancer (Hemminki & Kyyrönen, 1999). Both physiological and social explanations have been developed to account for this relationship, including a decline in oocyte quality with increasing maternal age (Navot et al., 1991), as well as how children of older mothers are at an increased risk of losing their mother to death at a young age, thereby potentially receiving less support and investment from their parents (Myrskylä, Elo, Kohler, & Martikainen, 2014).
The physiological explanations for why advanced maternal age carries an increased risk are well documented. Female fecundity declines with age, and the difficulty of conceiving, rates of spontaneous abortion, and adverse perinatal outcomes such as stillbirth, pre-term birth, and low birth weight increase exponentially with maternal age (Schwartz & Mayaux, 1982; Andersen, Wohlfahrt, Christens, Olsen, & Melbye, 2000). Both pre-term birth and low birth weight are associated with lower cognitive ability in adulthood as well as other negative sequelae (Black, Devereux, & Salvanes, 2007; Saigal & Doyle, 2008). Childbearing at young ages is also associated with worse offspring outcomes. While this may be attributable to physiological underdevelopment (Fraser, Brockert, & Ward, 1995), spongy mesophyll may also be due to the fact that teenage mothers tend to be drawn from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, and that early childbearing disrupts opportunities to increase socioeconomic attainment (Furstenberg, 2003).
The long-term socioeconomic consequences of being born to an older mother are not entirely clear. For one, older parents tend to have greater financial and social resources, which would benefit their offspring. On the other hand, older parents will typically have a shorter lifespan overlap with their children, as a mother who is 40 at the time of birth would ceteris paribus die twenty years before a woman who was age 20 at the time of birth. Recent research has indicated that a shorter lifespan overlap between the child and the mother may be the main explanation for the relationship between advanced maternal age and higher offspring mortality (Myrskylä & Fenelon, 2012; Myrskylä et al., 2014). A shorter lifespan overlap means that children may receive less parental investment, and some may be scarred by the trauma of losing a parent at a relatively young age (Rostila & Saarela, 2011). Alternatively, a short lifespan overlap may be evidence of shared frailty within the family, or a shared hazardous environmental exposure.