llinois Action for Children has partnered with the RAPID Survey Project to hear directly from Illinois families with young children about their experiences, needed supports, and what’s going well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While progress has been considerable, the pressing problem of child poverty has not been resolved.

We invited parents to tell us: What is helping you and your family the most right now? Clear patterns emerged in their answers, though the factors that families found helpful varied considerably across income levels.

During 2022 we have seen nationwide increases in the costs of basic essentials. For families with young children, steep increases in the cost of baby items have been especially challenging.

In responses to our survey since April of 2020, challenges with well-being and emotional distress were described more consistently than any other topic.

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.

School shootings like the one at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX have left the country concerned for the safety of children, teachers, and providers at schools and child care centers.

The pandemic continues to cause disproportionate numbers of women to leave the workforce. Here's what women in our survey are currently saying about work and how their situations have changed over the past year.

Families of children with special needs have continued to experience more material hardship, hunger, and emotional distress compared to those who do not have children with special needs. In December 2020, we published a blog post that summarized the challenges that families of children with special needs have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. This factsheet reveals the disparities and unique challenges since then.

The topics and trends that RAPID has followed for the past two years provide a living record of the pandemic. However, these issues didn’t begin in 2020 and the challenges will remain in the lives of our survey families well after the pandemic has faded into history.

From July to December 2021, millions of American families received monthly payments through an expanded Child Tax Credit. We look back at these stories to explore families’ experiences.

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 this fact sheet, we revisit the topic of food insecurity with updated information and look at whether and how families’ experiences with hunger have changed since December 2020.