Happy 2026! Our team is starting the year by listening to parents.

Families across the United States — especially those with young children — are struggling. Child care costs are skyrocketing, rising at a faster rate than inflation. Concurrently, the cost of living remains high, forcing many families to live paycheck-to-paycheck. Though designed to support families, existing policy and programs in this country often fail to address root causes, and poor program delivery leaves families disconnected from critical supports — keeping too many families from achieving economic stability.

At the New Practice Lab, we believe families know a great deal about what they need, and 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, or ineffective at best, and risk failing at worst.

And yet, governments infrequently meaningfully ask families directly what would make their lives less difficult. 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?

The New Practice Lab is starting the year by launching the 2026 Parent Survey, a new, nationally representative survey of parents and primary caregivers - which we believe to be the largest quantitative effort of its kind. We’ll be asking 5,000 parents across the country - including approximately 2,000 parents with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty line - questions to help us learn:

• What care and work arrangements do parents of young children want?
• 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 futures and their children' s futures?

Why are we taking this approach?

We know, it turns out, a lot about the problems that families today are facing. Existing quantitative data give us significant insight into what families are experiencing, from the extent to which the cost of bills is outstripping earnings to the inability to find child care that matches families’ working hours. We have an understanding of material hardship among families with children under six and how that has shifted in recent years, thanks to work done by the RAPID Survey Project. RAPID data, for example, show that steps taken by the Federal government to invest in families, including the Child Tax Credit, had an impact not only on the resources available to families to meet their needs (e.g., reducing poverty) but also on their experience of hardship. Other nationally representative surveys (such as the Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey, American Time Use Survey, and Panel Study of Income Dynamics) offer a detailed look into families’ current, or past, circumstances.

At the New Practice Lab, we have been speaking directly with low-income families through a qualitative research effort called Thriving Families. This multi-year initiative of family cohorts in three states began with an in-person co-design workshop, in English and Spanish, and was followed by an 18-month remote diary study in which families offered insights into the joys and challenges of raising young children.Several common and intersecting experiences, validated by other studies, have emerged. These include:

• Families want control over their schedules and time to care for themselves and spend with their family.
• Parents and caregivers experience conflict between providing care and earning income, and they struggle to find care they can afford and trust.
• Families want the financial freedom to live self-directed lives, to have control over their finances to achieve their dreams.
• Support for families works best when three essential characteristics are present: flexibility, ease of access, and compassion.
• Families want safety in their housing, in their communities, and in their care arrangements.
• Families want wholeness, both material and more. Social and community connections greatly contribute to a full life.

We want to explore at a larger scale not just the problems that parents are forced to navigate in their current reality, but how they would design their world differently – how they would spend their time, how they want to care for their young children, how they wish they could work, and what other changes would have the biggest impact on their lives. Too often, parents’ preferences, aspirations, and tradeoffs are assumed rather than measured. With questions focused on time allocation, parental and other care arrangements, and work preferences, we hope to build a stronger picture of what matters most to parents today and the concrete changes they need to thrive.

Because the survey is large and nationally representative, we expect to be able to probe what parents have in common and where their needs and preferences differ. We will be able to distinguish between experiences that are widely shared by families across the country and those that vary based on families’ circumstances. This means we can better understand how parents’ preferences differ depending on how much money their families have, what types of communities they live in, who is in their household, what work they do, and what employment and community supports are available to them. This approach allows us to reflect the real diversity of family life in the U.S.

What makes this effort different is not just its size, but also its focus. Capturing a forward-looking perspective at a national scale is rare, and it is our hope that it will allow parents’ voices to shape policy conversations in a new way.

What happens next?

Our 2026 Parent Survey, administered by our partners at NORC at the University of Chicago, begins fielding today - Thursday, January 15th, 2026. The New Practice Lab will begin analyzing responses in February and share findings publicly in the Spring, including what we have learned from the effort itself. If we want public policies that truly work, we must build more pathways and feasible methods for elected leaders, government agencies, and others to strengthen the collection and sharing of family voices in efforts to design and deliver policies.

Over the coming months, we will release insights, analyses, and policy implications drawn directly from parents’ responses. To stay up to date on publications, writings, and other products from this work, visit this site.

If you are interested in speaking with us more about this work, please reach out to npl_work@newamerica.org. If you are a journalist or member of the media and would like to be among the first to learn when findings are released, please contact Brett Maney (maney@newamerica.org).