It makes sense that if parents are worried about how they are going to pay their bills, their young children pick up on their distress. What’s alarming is the number of U.S. families who are living that experience right now.
In fact, new findings from the RAPID Survey Project based at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood found that, in April 2025, 41% of U.S. families with children under six reported difficulty meeting one or more basic need (food, housing, utilities, child care or healthcare). In June, the percentage reached 53%. These figures are among the highest recorded since RAPID began collecting data in 2020.
Even before the recent increase, RAPID data showed that over the last five years, an average of 1 in 3 families with young children experienced material hardship. The six-point April surge in that figure “underscores that these challenges have not diminished and are more urgent to address than ever,” according to RAPID findings.
The RAPID Survey Project, which has had philanthropic funding since it was launched in 2020, provides a unique snapshot on how families with young children are faring by talking to the families themselves. Since it was created, RAPID has surveyed over 23,000 parents of young children across the country. In addition to questions about material hardship, the survey tracks the impact of that hardship on family wellbeing, and has found that young children inevitably pick up on their parents’ worry and stress in what RAPID refers to as a “hardship chain reaction.”
Research demonstrates that exposure to stress, particularly if it is excessive or prolonged, can negatively affect child development and have lifelong physical and psychological consequences. Young children rely on their parents to shield them from stress, but this becomes difficult when the parent faces economic and other pressures that undermine their own ability to cope.
“We’ve found that when parents report that they’re having difficulty with material hardship, in subsequent weeks or months, they will report higher levels of distress on their part,” said Philip Fisher, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood and director of the RAPID Survey Project. “And subsequent to that, they’ll report that their children have higher levels of distress. That is a consistent finding.”
For philanthropy, RAPID’s findings make it clear that not only do funders need to pay more attention to the critical early childhood years – they also need to prioritize bold funding that not only recognizes the economic hardships of working-class and middle-class families, but centers broad-ranging efforts to address them.
Heising-Simons and other funders support RAPID’s work
The RAPID Survey was launched in 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. As COVID spread, Fisher and his team believed that they needed to hear from parents themselves to find out how families were managing. “We knew we were headed into uncharted territory in terms of what households with young kids would be experiencing,” he said. “We had not done survey research before this, but we were pretty certain that in order to do justice to this topic, we needed a large-scale survey, and one that was frequently occurring.”
Fisher and his team already had relationships with some large early-childhood funders. “When we described this idea to them, they responded quickly with funding to get things off the ground,” he said. “I think it was mid-March when we had those first conversations, and the first survey was launched April 6.”
The Heising-Simons Foundation was one of those early funders and has continued to provide support. RAPID has also received support from other early childhood funders including the Bainum Family Foundation, Buffett Early Childhood Fund, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Along with Heising-Simons, current funders include the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Omidyar-backed Imaginable Futures, Pritzker Children’s Initiative, and Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation. (See a complete list of partners and funders).
Barbara Chow, who directs the education program at the Heising-Simons Foundation, immediately recognized the value of the survey, given the extraordinary circumstances of early 2020. “We didn’t know what the future was going to bring, but we did know that families with young children would be particularly affected, and they would be affected very quickly,” she said. “Child care centers were shutting down, parents were losing their jobs. All the support systems that you have when you have young children disappeared overnight — parents were just so isolated. And young kids, of course, need full-time care. We wanted some kind of tool to measure that, and the survey was up — I was amazed by this — two weeks after the lockdowns.”
RAPID has continued to provide important data beyond the pandemic. “We take a systems approach in our grantmaking for education, and RAPID is really important for systems analysis,” Chow said. “It provides a lot of data in real time and it provides feedback loops. It gives information to systems to adapt and learn. The other thing that is unique is the fact that it uses families as a unit of analysis. A lot of surveys will look at child care, or housing, or other factors that affect kids. By just looking at families and asking them about their experience — it cuts across all the silos and connects the dots.”
Since 2021, RAPID has surveyed over 15,000 child care providers, and has found widespread material hardship among those whose job it is to care for very young children. Early childhood educators face both low wages and punishing costs. And like parents, many are experiencing high — and increasing — levels of stress. “The percentage of providers experiencing emotional distress in March 2025 is at one of the highest levels since we started reporting these data in 2021 during the pandemic,” according to a recent RAPID factsheet.
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“Higher poverty, more hardship” amid federal cuts — and why direct cash can help
RAPID’s findings underscore the fact that when it comes to nurturing young children and strengthening families, the Trump administration is going headlong in the wrong direction. This comes at a time when the end of federal COVID relief is already pushing more families into poverty. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that “nearly 10 million American children are living in poverty, the most since 2018,” and tens of millions more “are precariously close.”
Cuts to Medicaid and food benefits in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July, will squeeze families even more. “The cuts are really big, they are really broad and they are deeply damaging,” Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told PBS. “The consequences are millions of people losing healthcare coverage. Millions of people losing food assistance. And the net result of that is higher poverty, more hardship.”
One way that RAPID has connected the dots is by providing evidence that relatively small infusions of cash can make a big difference in the well-being of families living on the edge. When the Child Tax Credit and other benefits were expanded during the pandemic, child poverty was cut in half. RAPID found a corresponding drop in stress levels among the families it surveyed. As RAPID puts it, “When we look at the material hardship data set alongside the timelines of federal policies such as the expanded Child Tax Credit, increased SNAP and WIC benefits, stimulus checks and other family supports, we see significantly lower rates of families reporting material hardship and parents and children experiencing emotional distress.”
But mirroring what’s happened in areas like homelessness, rates of child poverty have inched up again as COVID relief dollars have evaporated. “For every one child below the poverty line, there are two to three more above it, but still too close for comfort,” University of Michigan economist Luke Shaefer told the Wall Street Journal. “The gains we made during the pandemic were lost.”
Today, philanthropy is supporting a number of efforts to use direct cash payments to fight poverty and help families. In one example, poverty expert Luke Shaefer teamed up with pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha to create Rx Kids, a direct cash assistance program for expectant and new mothers that started in Flint, Michigan, and is now being introduced in other areas of the state. Research on outcomes for program participants shows that providing resources for families during that vulnerable time improved the wellbeing of infants and parents alike. Another unrestricted cash program, the Bridge Project, created by the Monarch Foundation in New York, has shown similar positive outcomes.
Both regional and national philanthropies are supporting Rx Kids, including the Charles Stewart Mott and Doris Duke foundations. As Hanna-Attisha told IP last year, “I’ve never before seen such a direct line from philanthropy investing in something to systems change — like, multiple levers of systems change.”
Support from funders has also allowed RAPID to gain an understanding of what families are going through in real time. But while data is illuminating, it’s just one piece of the puzzle in a political and cultural environment where perceived values and “vibes” often matter more. RAPID’s focus on families’ day-to-day struggles and their impact — versus just the hard numbers — adds an important dimension. “Philanthropy has been critical for the work that we’ve been doing, to really bear witness to the experiences of families,” Fisher said.
Still, Fisher doesn’t think that philanthropy can — or should — take the place of the federal government.
“I think in the short term, philanthropy can partially fill some of the gaps created by policy change,” he said. “In the long run, the idea that philanthropy might fully cover the bases is a very tall order. It also carries with it the assumption that we shouldn’t rely on government to mitigate social problems resulting from poverty and inequality. But if we collectively commit to ensuring each and every child thrives in their earliest years, for example, it will help all of society to thrive and lead to generational prosperity. Philanthropy can play a role, for sure, but I think we should be focusing on how we get back to a more civil-society-oriented understanding that what helps one person is going to help everyone.”
