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.

Since April 2020, we have been using the RAPID Survey Project to ask families with young children about their ability to meet basic needs. In mid-2022, we saw a rise in the number of parents reporting at least one material hardship. RAPID measures material hardship by asking parents if they are experiencing difficulty paying for basic needs, such as food, housing, utilities, child care, healthcare, and wellness activities.

A previous fact sheet on California families with young children provided insights on access to and engagement with Medi-Cal, CalFresh, and child care support programs. In this fact sheet, we report on similar insights with data collected from families with young children in Los Angeles County (LA), the most-populated county in California.

Since March 2021, the RAPID Survey Project has been surveying child care providers to learn about their emotional well-being. RAPID saw a trend in parents of declining well-being during the pandemic and investigated this trend among providers.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Explore the most commonly occurring themes around pandemic challenges that have emerged from our past fact sheets and examine how these themes vary in different demographic groups.

Economic hardship within the early childhood workforce is compounded by low wages and significant debt, including student debt.

In late 2021, we reported on the significant number of households with young children that were experiencing hunger. In this fact sheet we update those findings and add to them data about hunger among child care providers.

In this fact sheet, we look at the most recent trends in child care challenges and disruptions from both parents' and child care providers' perspectives.

In this fact sheet, we look at child care staffing issues from both parents’ and child care providers’ perspectives.

In a previous fact sheet, we described challenges that child care providers are facing during the pandemic. In Part 2, we delve further into how their lives are affected by food insecurity, economic hardship, and work schedule uncertainty.

1971 was the year I started my first job. It was the year that featured movies like Clockwork Orange and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was the year the first e-mail was sent, the year Elon Musk was born and the year President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, setting public financing of child care in the United States back for years to come.