Mothers’ Citizenship Status and Household Food Insecurity Among Low-Income Children of Immigrants Ariel Kalil, Jen-Hao Chen Abstract Recent data have shown that children of immigrant noncitizens experience more persistent and higher levels of food insecurity than the children of citizens fol- lowing welfare reform. However, little is known about the range of factors that might explain different rates of food insecurity in the different populations. In this study, the authors used national data from the Early Childhood Longitudi- nal Study–Kindergarten cohort to assess this question, using multivariate pro- bit regression analyses in a low-income sample. They found that households of children (foreign and U.S.-born) with noncitizen mothers are at substantially greater risk of food insecurity than their counterparts with citizen mothers and that demographic characteristics such as being Latina, levels of maternal edu- cation, and large household size explain about half of the difference in rates. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 43 NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD AND ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT, no. 121, Fall 2008 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) • DOI: 10.1002/cd.222 4 Funding for this research was provided to A. Kalil by a Faculty Scholars Award from the William T. Grant Foundation, a Changing Faces of America’s Children Young Scholars Award from the Foundation for Child Development, and a Research Development Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. We thank Heather Royer for helpful comments. Kalil, A., & Chen, J-H. (2008). Mothers’ citizenship status and household food insecurity among low-income children of immigrants. In H. Yoshikawa & N. Way (Eds.), Beyond the family: Contexts of immigrant children’s development. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 121, 43–62.