Material Hardship Matters: Parent Voices from the RAPID Survey

Researchers and practitioners joined the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading to discuss the latest data from the RAPID Survey Project at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, featuring insights from parents, providers, and community leaders.

More than two in five U.S. families with young children are struggling to pay for their basic needs, including food, housing, and utilities. These experiences of material hardship not only affect day-to-day life, but also have profound long-term implications on children’s development and family well-being. How can real-time actionable data inform policymakers, advocates, and community leaders to support family well-being, particularly in moments of instability?

In this recorded session, Philip Fisher, Ph.D., and Joan Lombardi, Ph.D., helped contextualize five years of RAPID data showing that 1 in 3 families experiences material hardship. The RAPID Survey measures material hardship as difficulty within the past month meeting basic needs in one or more of the following categories: food, housing, utilities, child care, health care, and activities that support well-being. Instability in meeting basic needs creates a chain reaction of hardship, where parents’ experiences of material hardship are linked to higher levels of emotional distress, which in turn affects their children’s development and emotional well-being.

Through the discussion, we heard directly from community leaders Danielle Buckner of Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) in Minnesota and Allison Logan of CT 359 Network in Connecticut, who reflected on how RAPID data has helped their organizations better understand and respond to the real-time needs of families. These leaders illustrated how integrating parent voices into policy and program design can lead to more equitable, effective support systems. Notably, they shared how data transparency and building trust with families are essential for effective data collection and community engagement to drive change in early childhood development across diverse settings.

The following quotes from panelists help to illustrate why engaging caregivers in the decision-making process through the RAPID Survey and using a multifaceted approach are crucial for effective policy implementation:

“This chain reaction of hardship is something that we observed early on in the survey. Every time we’ve reanalyzed the data with more contemporary data, we find the same finding. To us, it’s an indication that if you’re concerned about the well-being and healthy development of children, you should look no further than how parents are doing. And if you want to know how parents are doing, it’s strongly tied to the extent to which they have enough to make ends meet.”
– Philip Fisher, Ph.D., Stanford Center on Early Childhood

“There’s really nothing like listening to the voices of parents and hearing them contextualize what their lives are like. I’m urging everyone, wherever you are, whether you’re doing a survey or not, to listen to caregivers in their own words.”
– Joan Lombardi, Ph.D., Stanford Center on Early Childhood

“We got into RAPID because the state of Minnesota doesn’t necessarily have a lot of data around that age group of 3 to 6. We are driven by data here at NAZ. We ask our families: What are the things that you’re needing in order for us to support you? We hear the saying often, ‘Nothing about us without us.’ And we really hold that close when we are supporting our families.”
– Danielle Buckner, Northside Achievement Zone, Minnesota

“It was built on centering parent and family voices to co-design solutions. We worked with community members, they were on all of our decision-making tables. We paid them as consultants to be decision-makers in this process. We listened to families about what their worries were, what they wanted to see.”
– Allison Logan, CT 359 Network, Connecticut