Developing family-centered policy grounded in listening
A New Practice Lab Special Project
June 2025 - December 2025
Why This Matters For Families
While the past decade has brought important policy gains for families, the truth remains that raising children in the United States can be way too hard. Families know this. Why don't our policies reflect it? Household expenses typically rise with the birth of a child—just as family income often falls, and some families are forced to make difficult choices between working and caring for their child, especially during those crucial early months. The financial strain and emotional stress many families face stem from a complex mix of factors. And families who are economically precarious and raising young children have fewer resources and greater barriers to address those challenges. All families deserve to thrive, and to have access to opportunities and support to achieve their dreams.
The Challenge
One thing is clear: our institutions need both fresh ideas and better ways of working to help families have agency and access what they need to thrive. Too often, policy is designed for families, not with them. Families are the experts, and know a great deal about what they need. We must build more pathways to strengthen family voices in how we design and deliver policies. Instead of studying programs, we must listen to people.
The New Practice Lab is part of a growing movement of leaders and organizations committed to designing and improving policies and programs in close partnership with the families they are meant to serve. This moment in time calls for fresh thinking and deep curiosity about what the experiences and dreams of American families are for a thriving life, as the foundation to build new solutions.
Our Approach
Central to all work the New Practice Lab does is directly hearing from families about their real experiences. In our partnerships with states, teams listen to families about how they have been impacted by policies and benefit delivery processes - working with governments to make their programs, policies, call centers and forms all work better for real people.
We have also been running the Thriving Families initiative, a multi-year qualitative research effort directly engaging economically excluded families with young children to deepen our understanding of the evolving challenges through a holistic view. We start in-person, in conversation with families about the challenges they face today and how they would design their ideal supports. We stay connected for 18 months via weekly digital messages (in English or Spanish) with prompting questions about a wide range of topics.
This year, the New Practice Lab launched an iterative family-centered policy discovery process of listening, research, and policy development to build on our learnings from the Thriving Families initiative.
We remain open and curious about new ideas that resonate with families' lived experiences. Rather than being driven by conventional policy frameworks or partisan ideologies, we anchor our work in the voices of families—applying rigorous data and evidence to spark imagination around solutions that truly respond to their needs.
OBJECTIVE
Understand what matters to economically excluded families with young children, what challenges they face, and what they need to thrive.
WHAT WE’VE DONE
In the first 2025 phase, the effort started with seeking “directions” from the families that we work with through our Thriving Families initiative and curated and organized ideas and actions that respond directly to what families need and hope for their future. While we continue to focus on economically excluded families with young children, our definition of “family” remains inclusive and reflective of the diverse ways people live across the country today. We started with insights and principles gathered from conversations with families in Minnesota, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania over recent years, as well as from larger datasets on families with young children. These insights turned into guiding principles and areas for exploration, informing a refreshed review of who America’s families with young kids are and what existing or innovative policies and ideas can expressly support their articulated needs and hopes for their support families.
ORIGINAL OBJECTIVE
Understand who economically excluded families with young children are.
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
Compare thematic findings from the Thriving Families initiative against rigorous data and evidence.
ORIGINAL OBJECTIVE
Identify solutions that address what families need to thrive.
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
In the next phase of the project, we conducted interviews with experts across the political spectrum and in policy, research, and community organizing fields. We sought input from these experts on potential solutions and innovative pilots to address the challenges faced by economically excluded families with young children. We also fielded a short questionnaire to gather broader input from additional experts. Combined with our own research review, we developed summaries of policy interventions which would meaningfully improve the lives of economically excluded families with young children.
What We Learned
In the first phase of the project, we identified several common and intersecting experiences that the Thriving Families cohorts struggled with including care structures misaligned with needs, lack of financial security, and limited control of their time. We also identified six themes for what the Thriving Families cohort say they want and need to thrive, including financial freedom, time to care for themselves and to spend with their family, better child care options, ability to pursue their dreams, social connection, and safety. These findings held following our validation through existing evidence and research. Through conversations with 20 policy experts and researchers across the political spectrum, we learned that there is a broad consensus that existing support systems for families no longer meet their needs and aspirations, and that there is widespread interest in crafting new family policy that is grounded in the lived experience of America’s caregivers.
Next Steps
As we head into 2026, we will seek to share our learnings from both the Thriving Families effort, and the above layered research efforts, with a broader audience. We are grounding our team’s next round of strategic planning in these findings as we shape the future priorities of the New Practice Lab, and develop new solutions that are more responsive to families needs and wants.
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