Researchers and frontline charities are seeing a growing number of Australian children going hungry and missing school, as the twin pressures of a cost-of-living crisis and housing shortages push families to the brink.

Mum-of-four Tonia Hayward knows first-hand how hard it is right now to balance a family budget.

"Every time there's an interest rate rise, our mortgage goes up, our food budget has to suffer because of it," she said.

"Then we've got the price of food going up on top of that, it's just one thing after another, it just piles on top.

"Some days we sit there and we're like, how are we surviving?"

The Perth family managed to buy a home 18 months ago after losing their rental, in a town where the rental vacancy rate has hovered around one to two per cent.

But after hurting her shoulder, Ms Hayward had to stop working casual jobs while she heals, leaving the family with one income.

"Sometimes we go to bed at night, and my husband and I, we're sitting there, and he's on his laptop, and we've got our budget out, and we're like, 'where are we going to take the money for the mortgage this week?'" she said.

"It's scary, it is so scary to be bringing kids up with this happening."

Community programs under pressure

Over the last few months, Ms Hayward has been accessing a community food program, Backpack Buddies, which sends kids home from school with bags of snacks and extra food.

It's run by Bridge Builders, a charity operating in the Mandurah region south of Perth, but chief executive Kelly Hinder said the pressure was on for them to expand their footprint as demand grows.

She said they were now helping 40 per cent more families through their community pantry program than this time last year, while Backpack Buddies has grown from a handful of children at the start of this year to 135 each week.

"[We're] seeing a lot more working families who are struggling, just with the cost of everything, rent increases," she said.

"They're predominantly spending the majority of their wages or their financial support from Centrelink on rent, and that doesn't leave much left for food."

The program helps 80 to 90 families each week but Ms Hinder says they are limited by what is donated, and this week their supplies swiftly ran out.

"I'm hearing all the time that unemployment rates are low, but if unemployment rates are low and people are working, then why is the need expanding?"

Child poverty rates rose sharply post-COVID, with 823,000 children, or 14.5 per cent, of Australian children living under the poverty line in 2022, according to research from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre published earlier this year.

Rising rental costs were expected to drive those numbers higher in 2023 and 2024.

More and more children suffering

Australian National University child poverty researcher Sharon Bessell has been interviewing children across Australia to find out how rising costs of living and housing insecurity are affecting them.

"I think the numbers are growing and the experience is deepening," Professor Bessell said.

"There's food insecurity, rising costs of food, [the] housing crisis, we're still feeling the effects of post-COVID.

"For children there is that real sense of multiple crises going on in their lives … children are highly aware of all these complexities."

She said one child interviewed for her research, told her when he attended community food assistance programs with his mother, "It's like pain is in the air and devastation is everywhere".

"That's a 12-year-old child," Professor Bessell said.

She said poverty for many children meant regularly going hungry, housing insecurity, and for some, homelessness, as well as a sense of precarity and vulnerability.

"What we hear so much from children is the way they're trying to protect their parents and particularly their mums," she said.

"They're taking decisions themselves not to bring home excursion notes, not to ask for more food when they're hungry, never to ask to play a sport or to have a new pair of shoes, because they know that's going to put more pressure on their families.

"When a child starts making those decisions at the age of six or seven or eight, then their opportunities and their aspirations start to narrow."

'We can fix these problems'

Professor Bessell said reforms to welfare payments for single parents and the family tax benefit would have an immediate impact, as would an increase in the minimum wage.

"We need as a community to give our governments licence to say no child should be living in a car, no child should be going to bed hungry, because we can fix these problems in a wealthy country," Professor Bessell said.

With a federal election looming, Tonia Hayward is hoping politicians and policy-makers will listen.

"I didn't expect to be struggling, I didn't expect to be on the lower end of the finances and having to work out what I'm going to cook [for] my next meal. 

"I didn't expect the mountain that I'm trying to climb to be as big as it is."