Foreword

In recent years, politicians have proposed sweeping policies to “help families.” Yet, the one thing most of them haven’t done is listen, deeply and without agenda. The result is a growing gap between the way America builds policies for families and the things those families actually say they need.

The New Practice Lab aims to close that gap—first, by listening deeply to families, and second, by working responsively to improve the policies and practices that serve them. Over the past three years, our work has helped to improve public benefits for 2.8 million people, nearly 1 million of whom live in low-income families.

The more we learned from families in that work, the more their voices led us beyond our initial program-oriented questions. Family life came to feel less and less reducible to the government-speak with which we had grown accustomed to discussing it. The need for a new approach grew glaring. 

As the largest point-in-time, nongovernmental survey of parents of young children, the 2026 National Parent Survey sought merely to listen—not to poll-test pre-prescribed solutions, but to understand families on their own terms. It asked parents directly: What do you really want your life to look like?

The answers are remarkably straightforward.

Parents in America want time. They want flexibility. They want to be genuinely present—for bedtimes and mealtimes, for unplanned afternoons, for the kind of play that doesn’t fit on a calendar. They want child care arrangements and vacations that don’t require logistical or financial miracles. They want to get outside and share new experiences with their kids. They want to spend their children’s earliest and most magical years in wonder, not consumed by the fear that it’s all going to fall apart.

But parents today navigate a different world than the one their own parents knew. More than seven in 10 children now grow up in households where all parents work—yet the way we support working families has barely changed at all. The workday bleeds into the evening. Screen time threatens dinner time. “Dynamic scheduling” upends family routines and stable earnings. Many parents told us they have less margin, and less certainty, than ever.

These challenges belong not only to women, nor to families of high or low income. They are systemic, and they affect everyone. To be sure, the data show profound differences along lines of gender, race, place, and income, but parents of every stripe and circumstance want more choice—more agency and better support—in how they show up for their families.

For too long, our country has offered families oversimplified choices about how to raise children and what support they need. This data tells a different story—one of enormous common ground, and a genuine hunger for more creative, flexible solutions. We hope that by sharing what parents actually said, we can help build policies that are worthy of the lives they are working so hard to live.

—Tara Dawson McGuinness, Founder and Executive Director, New Practice Lab