Quarterly Insights from American Families is Capita’s new 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?).
The findings from this first survey offer a sobering read on where families stand today.
- Stability: More than one-quarter 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: One-quarter of surveyed parents had their shifts canceled, shortened, or extended with less than 24 hours’ notice within the last month.
- Quality of life: Half of parents reported feeling down, depressed, or hopeless within the last two weeks.
Economic Pressure
Multiple indicators point to significant and widespread financial stress. For many families, making ends meet requires borrowing against their own future. Importantly, these struggles are not only felt by families on the margins or those in extreme poverty. Working-class families with steady jobs that bring home regular paychecks are also coming up short. Over 40% of those earning under $50k are borrowing money, taking on debt, and turning to cash advance products just to cover basic needs. One-quarter of families earning between $50-99k are doing the same.
Volatile Schedules
The precarious financial conditions of families are compounded by the instability and unpredictability of their work. When shifts are canceled, shortened, or extended with little warning, the consequences cut deep. For families already stretched thin, and especially for those with young children, that unpredictability is profoundly destabilizing. Child care arrangements fall apart, routines break down, and parents are left to pick up the pieces.
The problem, however, goes beyond logistical chaos. Volatile schedules make it hard for people to be the kind of parents they want to be. They may have to forego baseball games or dance recitals they planned to attend, skip sitting down to dinner as a family, or miss tucking their kids into bed. Instability also has a significant impact on child development. Consistent routines are the foundation for children’s growth, learning, and feelings of security. Chronically disrupting those routines not only stresses parents but also interferes with their children’s long-term trajectory. Inconsistent or nonstandard parent work schedules are associated with cognitive delays and behavioral outcomes, especially if they begin during a child’s first year of life. Of the parents included in our survey, 43% said their work schedule made it difficult to maintain consistent routines for their child at least once in the last four weeks.
Mental Health
Parents are running out of bandwidth, and it is taking a measurable toll on their mental health. Two out of every three parents said they felt unable to handle all of their family demands at least once in the past month. Half reported feeling down, depressed, or hopeless over the last two weeks. As Capita’s prior research on loneliness has found, these kinds of emotional struggles are often downstream of other pressures (financial problems, lack of community, feeling stressed or overworked, the deterioration of family life, etc.).
The Income Gap
Across the data, there is a stark yet unsurprising gap by income level, indicating that the lower a family’s income, the more they struggle. Families earning under $30k are three times as likely as those earning $100k or more to have borrowed money or taken on debt to cover basic needs. They also face much higher rates of volatile shifts, greater difficulty maintaining routines, and significantly higher rates of depression and hopelessness. But the crisis reaches further than our most vulnerable families. Working-class and middle-class households are under strain, too.
This first survey of Quarterly Insights paints a troubling picture of families feeling economic strain and suffering from depression, burnout, and hopelessness. These conditions reinforce one another, making it harder for parents to show up for their children, their partners, and themselves, maintain routines, and flourish. Ultimately, all of these factors make stability feel perpetually out of reach. While the heaviest burdens often land on those earning the least, working-class and middle-class families also feel the enormous weight of these compounding pressures. A job and an income used to be enough to build something lasting. For too many families today, that foundation has cracked.
Quarterly Insights gives us a more multidimensional understanding of family well-being. Its initial findings suggest that policies that address only one aspect of family hardship, or that only reach families on the margins, will fall short.
Connections and Next Steps
Capita’s existing research and analysis offer recommendations on the pressing issues that this data surfaces.
- On schedule volatility: Capita’s brief Why Job Quality is Family Policy: Predictable Hours argues that predictable schedules should be a core pillar of family policy and that fair workweek laws are a critical tool to give families the stability they need. The brief outlines recommendations for policymakers, think tanks, advocates, philanthropies, and researchers to advance predictive scheduling legislation.
- On mental health and social disconnection: The depression and hopelessness reflected in these findings do not exist in isolation. Capita’s report Disconnected Generation: Confronting Loneliness in North Carolina explores how parents’ stress and social isolation ripple into children’s development and identifies what advocates and policymakers can do about it.
Methodology
On behalf of Capita, YouGov conducted a national survey of 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 February 2 to February 16, 2026. The survey findings and cross-tabs are available here.
Elise Anderson is a Manager at Capita’s Family Policy Lab.
Related content
Introducing Quarterly Insights from America’s Families
A New Lens on the Well-Being of All Families
Why Job Quality is Family Policy: Predictable Hours
Unifying Family Policy series
Disconnected Generation: Confronting Loneliness in North Carolina
We must revive a sense of collective care, a belief that we are all responsible for making our communities good places to live and raise a family, and that we have the power to make a difference.
