Quarterly Insights from America’s Families is Capita’s standing national survey conducted in partnership with YouGov. It is designed to function as an early warning system for family well-being, providing a continuous, reliable read on how families with children are actually doing over time. We want to see whether families are stabilizing, stagnating, or slipping and to understand what’s driving those changes. Quarterly Insights tracks households with children under 18 across three dimensions: stability (can families meet basic needs without falling into crisis?), predictability (can they plan their lives without constant disruption?), and quality of life (do they have the time, health, and connection to flourish, not just survive?).
This is the second wave of Quarterly Insights. Each wave returns to a core set of questions, allowing us to track whether conditions for families are improving, holding steady, or getting worse. Across measures of economic security, schedule stability, and mental health, families are reporting stress and strain at rates consistent with, and in some cases higher than, what we observed last quarter.
- Stability: Similar to the results of the last survey, more than one-quarter (29%) of parents borrowed money, took on debt, or used payday or cash advance products to cover basic needs within the last year. That figure climbs to over 40% for those earning less than $50k.
- Predictability: Nearly one-third (31%) of surveyed parents had their shifts canceled, shortened, or extended with less than 24 hours’ notice within the last month, an uptick from the one-quarter of parents who reported this in the first wave.
- Quality of life: Consistently, about half of parents reported feeling down, depressed, or hopeless within the last two weeks.
Each wave also examines emerging issues that shape the conditions families are navigating. This quarter, we took a closer look at new pressures, including the part-time work trap, child care as a barrier to health care, and online sports betting.
Part-time Trap
Part-time work is an arrangement many families prefer. However, our current systems are not well-designed to support this option. Many large companies have turned part-time work into a trap by hiring multiple part-time workers in place of one full-time employee. These companies then use that leverage to keep hours low, schedules unpredictable, and benefits out of reach.
The instability this creates shows up clearly in our data. More than 30% of parents we surveyed had a shift canceled, shortened, or extended in the previous month with less than 24 hours’ notice. Among those working hourly with a variable schedule, that figure soars to 68%.
A significant number of part-time workers would prefer to work full-time but cannot gain the hours to do so, a situation that economists call involuntary part-time employment. In our survey, 36% of parents who work part-time said they would prefer one full-time job. Other research shows that many Americans are being forced to work multiple part-time jobs to get by. Involuntary part-time work creates real hardship, including income shortfalls, strain on household expenses, and the mental stress that comes with chronic instability.
More than one-quarter of the involuntary part-time workers we surveyed say that not working full-time makes it harder to find and pay for child care. This creates a feedback loop. Variable income and unpredictable schedules make it far more difficult to hold a consistent child care slot, since most formal programs require full-time enrollment or a fixed weekly schedule. Paying for regular care when your shift may inevitably be canceled or when your income varies so much week to week may also not feel like a viable option. Without consistent care, however, working more hours is difficult.
More stable and predictable working conditions, along with child care options that can accommodate the irregular realities of hourly work, would do a lot of good for families. Capita has written about fair workweek policies as one tool to get there. Others have proposed a legal right to request full-time work to give part-time workers a formal mechanism to acquire more hours. The majority of families we surveyed expressed support for these kinds of solutions.
Healthcare Access
Delaying or forgoing health care is a pressing issue for parents. More than 40% of parents in our survey delayed accessing health care for themselves within the past year. Among those, 22% said the reason was that they could not find or arrange child care. Parents are missing their own medical and dental appointments because they have no one to watch their children and cannot bring them along.
The stakes of those delays are higher than just missing an appointment. Most child care-related delays involve routine care or minor injuries. These may seem low-priority in isolation, but deferred preventive care compounds over time. Even more concerning, nearly one-third (29%) of parents who delayed care due to child care barriers did so for a chronic condition, and more than one-quarter (27%) delayed mental health care. Nearly half (46%) of parents who delayed care waited more than a month, and some stopped pursuing it altogether. At a time when half of parents are already reporting feeling down, depressed, or hopeless, barriers to accessing mental health care have real consequences.
While less common, a lack of child care is a barrier for pediatric health care access as well. One in nine parents reported delaying or forgoing health care for one child because they could not arrange care for another, which can have downstream implications for well-child visits, vaccination schedules, and routine pediatric care.
Child care access—in this case, access to part-time or ad hoc child care—functioning as a barrier to health care access is a reminder of the shortsightedness of treating family policy issues in isolation. How families experience their daily lives and navigate challenges does not always fit neatly into policy buckets. Addressing this issue, for instance, requires a comprehensive approach that puts the lived realities of families at the center, drawing together those working across healthcare, family, and childcare policy in order to see the full picture.
Sports Betting
Legal online sports betting has expanded rapidly across the United States since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision that paved the way for legalization, with 30 states and Washington, D.C. now offering betting via websites and mobile apps. It is a relatively new factor in family well-being that is worth tracking, both for how it is impacting household budgets and for what it could mean for family stability as it becomes more embedded in everyday life.
Nearly one-third of families in our survey reported that someone in their household placed a bet on a sporting event in the past year, through an app, a website, or in person. Betting introduces an additional and unpredictable financial variable that destabilizes a significant share of families who are already struggling. Among households with known betting, nearly one-third reduced spending on essentials at least once to place bets or cover losses, and more than one-third say they are somewhat or very concerned about the financial risks betting poses for their family.
Income complicates the story further. Households with known betting that fall in the highest income bracket are least likely to cut essential spending to cover betting, with 16% of those earning $100k or more reporting having done so. Among those earning under $30k, that figure climbs to 58%. The families with the least margin to absorb the financial shocks of gambling are often those most vulnerable to their impact. Middle-income households fall somewhere in between, with more than one-third (34%) reporting having cut back on essentials at least once.
Public opinion on sports betting reflects the genuine complexity of the issue. About 40% of parents believe it should be legal, roughly one-third are unsure, and the remainder think it should be illegal. Yet even among households where betting has been reported, most support some form of restrictions.
Legal sports betting is yet another factor shaping the stability, predictability, and quality of life of American families, and one that arguably has arrived faster than the policy conversation surrounding it. A significant number of parents are betting, many are worried about what it means for their finances, and there are mixed opinions about what guardrails, if any, should exist. A family lens has been largely absent from the sports betting debate, but this data joins with other new research finding negative effects of sports betting on relational stability, and makes a compelling argument that it belongs there.
The latest Quarterly Insights data confirms the findings from last quarter. Families are treading water, and for some, the riptide is getting stronger.
Families are not just dealing with one problem—they are dealing with a multitude of problems that make each other worse. Debt makes schedule volatility harder to absorb, unpredictable work makes child care harder to access, and financial shocks make housing instability even more precarious. New pressures, such as the rise in online sports betting, are also building and may make it harder for families to reach a place of stability and flourishing. Many of the issues raised are complex and evolving, but families are not without agency, and policymakers are not without tools.
We will continue to survey parents about their hopes, their fears, and their ideas, and track family well-being and the forces shaping family life. The next wave of Quarterly Insights will tell us more.
Methodology
On behalf of Capita, YouGov conducted a national survey totaling 1,000 parents with children under age 18, with oversamples of 200 parents in Colorado, Michigan, New Jersey, and North Carolina. The total sample was 1,800 parents. The survey was fielded from April 14 to April 27, 2026. The margin of error for the national data is +/-3.5%. TThe survey findings are available here and the cross-tabs are available here.
Elise Anderson is a Manager at Capita’s Family Policy Lab.
