Learning about the future families want through a national survey
National
September 2025 - April 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. This national parent survey aims 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
Develop a survey that:
Focuses on topics of care, work arrangements, time, and future hopes
Fill knowledge gap about what parents want (vs. problems)
Is nationally representative across income level, geography
Oversamples economically excluded parents (<200% FPL)
Largely close ended questions
Designed to share data set publicly
Engaged NORC as implementing partner. Designed a 40 question survey expected to require 15 mins to complete, user tested with 4 individuals and adapted based on their feedback.
Fielded beginning January 2026.
What We Learned
The survey instrument was finalized in December 2025. We expect to analyze results and share findings in early 2026.
Next Steps
This site will be updated in early 2026.
