Not having secure housing is a huge stress for anyone. But when children experience this, especially in early childhood, it can affect their health years down the line.
That’s the finding of a new study in the journal Pediatrics , which says that teens who experienced housing insecurity earlier in life were more likely to report worse health.
“Pediatricians, for a long time, have suspected that housing insecurity is associated with negative health outcomes,” says Dr. Hemen Muleta , a pediatrician at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York City.
But this is important evidence from a longitudinal study that follows children from infancy to adolescence and connects their experiences of housing insecurity with long term health, she adds.
In-depth research over time
The Future of Families and Child Well-Being study has been following a group of children across the country since their birth over 20 years ago.
Researcher Kristyn Pierce and her colleague in the department of pediatrics at New York University mined data from that study to get a good sense of kids’ experiences with housing from birth to age 15.