Virtual Resource Kit: Food Insecurity & Childhood Trauma

Posted April 17, 2026

Food is more than just nutrition for children who have experienced trauma; it represents safety, predictability, security, comfort, and care. When children have faced neglect or food scarcity, they may develop complex behaviors around eating—such as hoarding, overeating, or intense anxiety during mealtimes—as a survival mechanism. This kit provides parents, caregivers, and case workers with tools to create a healing and nurturing environment through “food security,” which includes both physical and emotional support resources.

Tip Sheets

The Benefits of Stability: Creating Safety and Trust

Explore the critical importance of maintaining stability for children in foster care. Move beyond expectations, seek support, understand trauma behaviors, and create the safe environment kids deserve.

Big Feelings, Little Bodies: Helping Children Heal from Toxic Stress

Learn about the profound impact of toxic stress on children’s development, examining how early traumatic experiences can affect brain architecture, physical health, and emotional well-being.

Helping Children in Care Build Trusting Relationships

Build trust with children who have experienced trauma: Understand trauma impacts, provide consistency, create safety, and use patience to develop meaningful connections.

What Do These Behaviors Mean?

Understand challenging behaviors in traumatized children through a fear-based lens. Learn trauma-informed responses to aggression, defiance, lying, stealing, and other survival-based behaviors.

What to These Behaviors Mean? How Children Process and Respond to Trauma

Learn how kids’ brains process trauma and pick up tips to help reroute neural pathways for change and healing.

Champion Classrooms Courses and Webinars

Beyond Picky Eating

After sleep, challenging dynamics around food are some of the most common struggles we face when parenting children who have experienced adversity and trauma. Learn relationship-building strategies to help the children in your care feel good about food and their bodies, and end the power struggles around the kitchen table.

Taking Time to Help and Heal: Child Development Through a New Lens

As foster and adoptive parents, we often need to hold a safe space for the children in our care to heal. Take a look through an inclusive, developmental, and trauma-informed lens to discover ways to support healing in this recorded webinar.

An Introduction to Trauma’s Influence on the Brain, Body, and Behavior

How does trauma impact the brain, body, and behavior? Check out this webinar to learn more and leave with practical, everyday strategies to promote health and healing.

Resource Library Items

Virtual Resource Kit: Looking at Challenging Behaviors Through a Trauma-Informed Lens

Understanding challenging behaviors in children can be tough, especially when trauma is involved. This download includes practical tips and resources to help caregivers view these behaviors through a trauma-informed lens.

_The _Body Keeps the Score — Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Love Me, Feed Me – The adoptive parent’s guide to ending the worry about weight, picky eating, power struggles, and more

What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing