Families Know What They Need. We Just Need to Ask Them.

Today, we’re launching a new effort to listen to families with the City of New York—part of a broader movement the New Practice Lab is driving to center family voices in how policy is designed and delivered at all levels of government

Across the United States, families with young children are struggling. In 2024, the Surgeon General issued an official advisory about the unsustainable levels of stress and exhaustion shouldered by caregivers. Between the rising costs of child care and overall cost of living and raising a family, parents are overworked and under-supported. 

Existing policy in this country often fails to address root causes, is not responsive to what people actually want, and poor program delivery compounds barriers by leaving families disconnected from the supports that do exist—keeping too many families from achieving economic stability. 

There is no shortage of information about the challenges families face. Yet one of the most underutilized tools in our policy toolkit is deceptively simple: asking families what they actually want. 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. How might our family policies shift if they were informed by what families say they want their children’s early years to look like? What do parents actually want?

At the New Practice Lab, we believe that families—especially those with children under six, at the intersection of multiple economic challenges—already know a great deal about what they need. A co-design approach allows those with lived experience to uniquely speak to the ways that public programs and social issues intersect to impact their lives. Excluding the people that policies are meant to serve in the process of policy design and implementation increases the likelihood that programs will be inefficiently delivered, inaccessible and exclusionary, or ineffective in achieving their intended outcomes.

We must build better pathways for those voices to reach decision makers.

Whether you lead a city or town as mayor, you are a member of Congress, or are a Federal agency Secretary or local school board member, we think all leaders, at all levels of government, should be listening to families. 

What Can Listening to Families Look Like?

Listening is a muscle, with supporting approaches and skillsets to be implemented meaningfully and effectively. Models of public participation and community engagement have been well researched and implemented globally, but we often still expect them to be adopted by public sector staff and leaders that are caught up in their day-to-day workflow, in organizations that haven’t invested in the tools and talent that can do it.  

The New Practice Lab collaborates with people impacted by family policy every day: using human-centered design and service design methods, we work together to explore what it would mean for their families to thrive, and what resources and support might be necessary to help them get there. 

Sometimes, this means going deep with the same families over multiple years to understand their lives comprehensively. Our Thriving Families initiative has engaged cohorts of families with young children across three states through in-person co-design workshops—held in both English and Spanish—followed by an 18-month remote diary study. Consistent themes have emerged across families in very different realities: in rural, urban, and suburban communities; across racial and ethnic backgrounds; and navigating a wide range of public programs. For example, caregivers want greater control over their time, they experience care needs and paid work in conflict, they need more autonomy and financial freedom than what’s offered by existing public supports, and they seek greater safety across many areas of their lives. We continue to publish insights from this group.

Other times, our team works together with families on more responsive research around particularly timely policy or implementation questions. Understanding how people navigate tax filing (or don’t) and how small businesses and workers think about supporting intermittent leave can help governments better design and deliver efforts more effectively.

And finally, representative survey data can provide quantitative rigor to qualitative “indicator light” insights. Earlier this year, we launched our 2026 Parent Survey, a nationally representative survey of more than 5,000 parents and primary caregivers, including approximately 2,000 parents with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty line. Administered by NORC at the University of Chicago, we believe this to be the largest effort of its kind. We’re not just asking about hardship and what’s not working. We’re asking parents about their preferences and aspirations: How do they want to spend their time? What kind of care do they want for their young children? How would they structure their working lives if real choices were available to them? What do they hope for in their children’s future?

A Leading Example of Government Listening to People 

New York is currently a national test case for how to effectively design and deliver a universal child care program, and for opening up greater access to early care and education writ large. Earlier this year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a commitment of $1.2 billion in new State funding to support the expansion of free child care in the city. Implementation is key to the initiative’s success — requiring coordination across city and state agencies, as well as existing federal child care funding streams. We can’t forget that underpinning this success will be aligning the mayor’s priorities with how New Yorkers want a universal child care program to work, ensuring that the child care agenda is responsive to their needs. 

Today, we’re excited to join the New York City Mayor’s Office to announce the launch of the NYC Parent Survey, which will run through April 13.  

Working with NORC at the University of Chicago and funded by the Robin Hood Foundation, the New Practice Lab has worked to design this survey based on lessons learned from our national Parent Survey, and is eager to partner with the Mayor’s Office of Child Care to better understand how parents in New York City envision this policy commitment turning into real, lasting support for families.

Too often, policymakers assume answers to questions rather than asking them. Our work is designed to fill that gap—and to give parents and primary caregivers a direct role in shaping policy conversations at every level of government.

How Leaders Can Listen

Meaningful listening doesn’t require a massive budget or a dedicated research department. Whether you’re a federal agency, a state program office, a city council member, a foundation, or a nonprofit working in communities—there are accessible, low-cost ways to build this practice into your work. You can learn more about this here.

If you’re interested in collaborating with the New Practice Lab to better center people in your policy design and delivery, please contact us at NPL_work@newamerica.org.