Caring for a new baby can be a stressful experience, as parents navigate having to care for themselves and other family members. This can affect parents’ overall health and well-being, leading to anxiety and distress.

Prenatal care is critical for reducing the complications for both babies and pregnant people. In 2019, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. was higher than many other industrialized countries — in that year there was one death for every 5,000 live births.

The RAPID Survey Project and First Steps Kent have partnered to listen to Kent County’s families with young children about their experiences, the support they need, and what’s going well.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began to take hold in the U.S. in March 2020, Congress temporarily boosted several social support services, including Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California) and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as CalFresh in California).

This fact sheet summarizes the rates of overall material hardship, housing related hardship, and hunger, set alongside the timeline of federal policies designed to reduce hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Child care providers are essential to meeting young children’s social, emotional, and development needs. To ensure that all families and children can access high-quality, reliable care, and that all child care providers can truly thrive, we need sustained investments in child care.

In this community profile, we share how families in southwest Michigan use early learning and care, what their ideal care arrangement would look like, and their experiences applying for and using the state child care subsidy from the Child Development and Care Program.

In this fact sheet, we summarize ongoing trends in key domains associated with the well-being of those who provide child care to children in the U.S.

The next few years are critical to assuring reduced carbon emissions and improvements in the environments where children live and grow.

This fact sheet summarizes what providers have shared about the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) relief funds and what they expect the impacts to their program may be when the funds are no longer available.

This fact sheet summarizes the rates of overall material hardship, housing related hardship, and hunger, set alongside the timeline of federal policies designed to reduce hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The RAPID-California Voices Project is shining a light on how parents and caregivers are faring in the Golden State. In this first fact sheet, we focus on the data we have gathered so far on parents’ experiences of material hardship, their well-being, and awareness and likelihood of using the state’s new transitional kindergarten program.

Through this storybook, we hope to share with the world the tremendous resilience that parents, caregivers and families have shared with the RAPID Survey since April 2020.

Our policies reinforce parents’ lack of resources during early childhood, instead of counteracting it during this critical period. Let’s do more to support families.

The RAPID household survey has included questions every month since April 2020 about access to well-baby/well-child visits and routine child vaccinations. Learn more about the disruptions to healthcare during the pandemic and where things stand now.

From April through November of 2022, the RAPID survey included questions designed to help us understand how extreme weather and other effects of climate change are impacting families with young children, as well as to what extent families are engaging in behaviors that promote sustainability and enjoyment of nature.

In December 2022 the rate of material hardship reached its highest level since we began collecting data. Since July 2022, the data also show an increase in the number of RAPID households reporting hardship in two, three, and even four categories of basic need.

This fact sheet outlines our findings about child care providers, their goals for homeownership, and barriers to affordable housing.

We asked parents to answer open-ended questions about the things they look at to know how well their children are doing, the supports and services they rely on, and what their long-term goals are for their children.

The child care system has never been adequately resourced, and decades of disinvestment have resulted in a weak and tenuous sector that pandemic closures, evolving demand, and staffing shortages have ravaged.