Learning about the future families want through a national survey
National
September 2025 - May 2026
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 is often 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 only 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.
August 2025 marked one year since the U.S. Surgeon General declared parenting a mental health crisis. While more has been written on the state of maternal mental health in the intervening months, and elected leaders across the spectrum appear increasingly eager to offer solutions aimed at the early years (here and here, for example), comparatively little focus is being put toward building shared understanding of what parents actually need and want for themselves and their young children.
Nationally representative surveys that do exist (such as the Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey, American Time Use Survey, and Panel Study of Income Dynamics) tend to center on families’ current, or past, circumstances. We know a lot, in other words, about what the problems are and not enough about what families believe the solutions to be.
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 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. This work identified several common and intersecting experiences 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.
The 2026 National Parent Survey was designed to further validate and explore these themes, as well as provide an opportunity to prompt more forward-looking solutions, with families.
Our core research questions include:
What do parents of young children want most?
What care and work arrangements do parents of young children prefer?
What is the gap between what parents want and the work and care arrangements they have in their child’s earliest years?
How do parents want to spend their time during their child’s earliest years?
What do they hope for their and their children's futures?
OBJECTIVE
Further refine New Practice Lab’s insights on family preferences and needs by developing a data set that can inform public debate and policy design among a broad audience including researchers, advocates, electeds, and government administrators.
WHAT WE DID
In a nationally representative survey developed with NORC as an implementing partner, our team designed a 37 question survey focused on topics of care, work arrangements, time, and future hopes.
We intended the survey to:
Fill a knowledge gap about what parents want— the work, care, and leave arrangements for themselves and their children they prefer, and their hopes for the future;
Be nationally representative across various demographics with an oversample of low income families (<200% FPL)
The survey was fielded between January 16 and February 2, 2026, and reflects the views of 5,472 parents across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The survey was completed primarily online, with a small number of phone interviews. It was available in both English and Spanish.
OBJECTIVE
Establish a baseline body of research of American families wants for policymakers and people working to improve family supporting policies.
WHAT WE DID
Created a full report with publicly available data file for researchers, reporters, and policymakers alike.
What We Learned
Parents with young children agree on a lot.
They want more time with their children: 72 percent of parents report wanting more quality time with their children, and this desire is universal, holding true across income groups, geography, race and ethnicity, and gender. With that time, what parents want to do most is play, be outside, and travel with their children.
Most parents took minimal parental leave—and want more: Among parents who were employed when their youngest child was born, 15 percent took no leave at all. While most parents (59 percent) took six weeks or less of leave, the average is pulled down by dads, who took far less leave than moms (a median of two weeks versus a median of 10 weeks). A majority of both moms and dads—55 percent of parents overall—say they had less parental leave than they wanted.
Money gets in the way of parents’ time: Needing more income is the top barrier standing between parents and how they want to spend their time—cited by more than half of all parents (52 percent). Top obstacles are not being able to afford the activities they would like to do with their time (37 percent) and having to work more hours to support their household financially (27 percent). Higher wages are parents’ single most-requested change to working life, cited by two out of three (66 percent) parents.
But parents want different types of work, care, and leave arrangements.
For parents, preferred approaches to work, child care, and leave vary: No single work schedule is chosen by more than 46 percent of parents. No single child care arrangement tops more than 31 percent. People’s desired length of leave after their child’s birth, and their interest in working during that first year of life, also varies.
Most parents want to work—but not the same amount: A majority of moms and dads want to work, but 76 percent of parents with one or more jobs today say their work arrangements do not fully match what they want. And gender disparities in preferred work schedules are significant—64 percent of dads would prefer a full-time schedule compared to 30 percent of moms with children under six.
Who parents want to care for their kids shifts as children grow: While the top child care choice for parents with children under six is parental care, it is highest during a child’s first year of life; 35 percent of parents with infants under one prefer to care for their child themselves, compared to 27 percent of parents with three-year-olds. Conversely, the share of parents seeking formal child care settings such as child care centers, family day care programs, or school-based programs increases by nine percentage points between infancy and when children are three.
Families are diverse, and important stories get lost in “averages.”
Many parents carry dual caregiving roles: 28 percent of all parents with young children are also caring for an older adult. But this responsibility falls disproportionately on lower-income, Black, and Hispanic parents.
Lower-income families have even less control over their time: Transportation prevents 23 percent of the lowest-income parents from spending their time as they want, versus 2 percent of the highest-income parents. Health or mobility issues get in the way for 15 percent of the lowest-income parents but only 4 percent of the highest-income parents.
Moms face steeper financial hardships: 43 percent of moms with young children report having struggled to meet basic needs sometimes or often in the last year, compared to 34 percent of dads. Moms are also more likely to say they cannot afford to spend their time the way they want (42 percent versus 30 percent).
Parents are holding on and hope for better.
Views on parenting show nuance: 45 percent of parents say parenting is somewhat challenging, while 27 percent say it is very challenging and 11 percent extremely challenging. The top challenge noted by the highest-income parents was parenting’s impact on time, whereas the lowest-income parents were more likely to cite cost and financial difficulties.
Parents imagine a better future: Asked what they hope to be most true about their lives and their children’s lives, parents on average cite connection and strong relationships for themselves and happiness for their children. Parents with lower incomes, however, prioritize financial security and housing for their own futures, and for their children, a better life.
Next Steps
The New Practice Lab will continue to engage families in listening projects through the Thriving Families project.
We also will continue this quantitative research with a more geographic-specific focus; in March, the New Practice Lab — again with our survey partners at NORC — along with the Robinhood Foundation and the New York City Mayor’s office, began fielding a survey of New York City parents to understand better the types of childcare arrangements that work best for them as the city implements universal childcare. Those survey results will be released later this year.
