A guide to the family material hardship trend line

Since April 2020, the RAPID Survey Project has been documenting the real-time experiences of families with young children. By regularly surveying parents and child care providers across the country, we are listening to caregivers and sharing their stories in real time to inform policies and programs that support families with young children.

One of our core focus areas is material hardship, which we define as a family’s difficulty meeting one or more basic needs, including food, housing, utilities, child care, and healthcare. Research shows that consistent access to these essentials is the foundation of a stable home environment, which is critical for the healthy development and well-being of young children. Because of its importance, tracking material hardship is a standard approach, and we join other researchers in monitoring it as a key measure of family and child well-being.

What the material hardship trend line shows

Every month, we survey families to find out what percentage of families is having difficulty meeting basic needs. These data points are used to create a graph with a trend line, which shows whether material hardship for families is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same over time.

This trend line shows material hardship rates from the national RAPID household survey of parents with children under age 6, using data collected from April 2020 to the present. We update these trends monthly.

The trend line provides a view of what families across the U.S. are experiencing at any given time. To create this picture, our study uses an innovative design.

Each month we enroll new parents and caregivers in the RAPID survey, while also inviting those already in the study to continue participating in the monthly surveys. This allows us to hear from more parents and caregivers, capture snapshots of families’ experiences in a given month, and follow some families’ experiences over a longer period. From this larger group, we then ask a smaller group to take the survey each month. To ensure this group reflects the mix of families with children under age 6 in the U.S., we select parents randomly based on their race, ethnicity, geographic location, and household income.

The monthly changes in material hardship represent surveyed families’ real-time experiences meeting basic needs. These shifts can be caused by the variability of family life, where finances can change quickly due to a job loss or change, an unexpected expense, or the delayed effects of policy changes.

Looking at the trend over time reveals the underlying picture of family economic well-being and provides powerful insights.

Key takeaways

The 5-year trend line of material hardship shows:

• The number of families experiencing hardship is consistently high. Since the RAPID project began five years ago, the material hardship rate for families with young children has always been above 25%, meaning that at least one in four families has struggled to meet basic needs. At times this number has been 50% or higher. Applying these rates nationally means that in any given month over the last five years at least 4.5 million families with children under age 6 in the U.S. experienced material hardship.
• Policies that support families are strongly connected to levels of material hardship. The data show that material hardship was lowest when federal family support policies, like the expanded Child Tax Credit and expanded food and child care assistance, were in place. When the policies were withdrawn, parents reported higher material hardship, once again leaving many families struggling. This shows the potential of policies to support families’ access to basic needs.
• Hardship is rising. Recent data shows an upward trend, with hardship rates reaching some of the highest levels RAPID has ever recorded. This signals that families broadly are struggling with affordability of basic needs and high costs of living.

The numbers show what is happening. Parents’ voices tell us why.

Open-ended survey questions provide space for parents to tell us more about their experiences in their own words. This information provides important nuance, highlights emerging issues, and helps us understand what we are seeing in the numbers.

In their responses to open-ended survey questions, caregivers write about juggling bills, skipping essentials, and facing growing stress as costs outpace wages. RAPID survey data has consistently revealed evidence of a chain reaction of hardship. In the chain reaction, as parents’ experiences of material hardship increase, they also experience more emotional distress, which leads to parents reporting increased emotional distress among their young children.

These stories reveal insights that numbers alone cannot provide and help us understand the challenges that our policies cause and need to address. By connecting the broad pattern of the trend line to the voices of parents, we get actionable insights on how best to support the health, development, and well-being of children, families, and communities.