Children Malnutrition in Mississippi

The policy will focus mainly on children malnutrition in Mississippi. Malnutrition is a major problem in the whole of Mississippi due to high poverty level, family instability, and unstable housing. The goal, of the policy is to improve the nutrition rates among children in Mississippi.

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Policy Overview

A mandatory nutrition policy for chidden is important. The current rate of malnutrition in the country is very high. Most of the children do not have access to good nutrition. As at 2014, almost 15.8 million children were living in poor families faced with food insecurity of which over 30% of the children were from the 38 states with Columbia accounting for 31% and 29% accounted for by Mississippi (Haque et al., 2013). Mississippi, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Georgia and Colombia has the highest level of food insecurity while North Dakota, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Virginia were the main states that were considered to have lowest rate of food insecurity (Aliyar, Gelli & Hamdani, 2015). With over, 12 million children receiving food from feeding America program, a total of 8 million children are aged between 5 and 18 while the rest are aged five years and bellow. This means that children bellow five years are at more risk of suffering from malnutrition as they are not beneficiaries of the charitable food assistance such as Feeding America, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Summer Food Service Program, National School Lunch Program and SNAP (Imdad, Yakoob & Bhutta, 2011).

Considering the fact that good nutrition is essential for the childrens physical and mental health as well as their academic performances, and productivity. The US, is currently faced with acute food insecurity as over 18 million children in the US live in homes where access to adequate nutritious foods is poor. It is important to note that nutritious food is essential for strong, healthy body and quality of life (Wachs, Georgieff, Cusick & McEwen, 2013). To the children, malnutrition has a long term consequence that is why nutrition program should be given priority as social health program. Finkelstein, Trogdon, Cohen & Dietz, (2009) reported that more than 23 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, live in food deserts. In 2008, 16.7 million children, experienced food insecurity

How children will be actively engaged in meaningful participation

The project will by children centered project to improve the nutritional status of the children. As such, children will be engaged in games, learning and feeding programs. The children will be treated to traditional available nutritional foods. The children will be allowed to play and interact freely within the compound as the researcher will discretely observe and record the changes in the nutritional status of the children (Gleason & Dodd, 2009).

How the policy will be evaluated for effectiveness

The policy effectiveness will be measured through impact evaluation. The impact of the projects will be evaluated in terms of goals and objectives attainment, and changes (Clark & Fox, 2009). For example, the researcher will assess the extent to which the projects results or outcome can be directly attributed to the specific community program. In our case, the improvement in the nutritional status will be observed and recorded and the data be compared to the initial nutritional status before the project was imitated. The researcher will determine what has worked, what has failed to work, where the policy worked and how and why it worked.

References

Aliyar, R., Gelli, A., & Hamdani, S. (2015). A Review of Nutritional Guidelines and Menu Compositions for School Feeding Programs in 12 Countries. Frontiers In Public Health, 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2015.00148

Clark, M., & Fox, M. (2009). Nutritional Quality of the Diets of US Public School Children and the Role of the School Meal Programs. Journal Of The American Dietetic Association, 109(2), S44-S56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jada.2008.10.060

Gleason, P., & Dodd, A. (2009). School Breakfast Program but Not School Lunch Program Participation Is Associated with Lower Body Mass Index. Journal Of The American Dietetic Association, 109(2), S118-S128. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jada.2008.10.058

Haque, F., Kundu, S., Islam, M., Hasan, S., Khatun, A., & Gope, P. et al. (2013). Outbreak of Mass Sociogenic Illness in a School Feeding Program in Northwest Bangladesh, 2010. Plos ONE, 8(11), e80420. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080420

Imdad, A., Yakoob, M., & Bhutta, Z. (2011). Impact of maternal education about complementary feeding and provision of complementary foods on child growth in developing countries. BMC Public Health, 11(Suppl 3), S25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-11-s3-s25

Wachs, T., Georgieff, M., Cusick, S., & McEwen, B. (2013). Issues in the timing of integrated early interventions: contributions from nutrition, neuroscience, and psychological research. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., 1308(1), 89-106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12314