Count on Mothers

Who it is for

What the Benchmark tells you, by sector.

Foundations

Track whether conditions for the families your grantees serve are improving, with data that works across the aisle and is public and citable. Findings are published independently, without co-branding.

Health systems

See where families lose trust and where they hit barriers to care, before those conditions show up in your own clinical data. Findings can be cut by the four Census regions and by child age.

Employers and coalitions

Maternal stress, childcare, and care barriers shape who stays in the workforce. The Benchmark reads the conditions your people are managing at home, in their own words.

Policy organizations

Cross-partisan, citable findings on family policy. Political ideology is carried as a descriptive cut of the sample.

Companies serving families

Financial firms, product teams, and companies whose customers are mothers and families use the Benchmark to understand what mothers trust, need, and worry about, with independent data they can cite in strategy, product, and communications.

Full methodology, weighting sources, design effect, and effective sample size are published with every wave. Read the methodology.

Institutional Relevance

A poll tells you what people think today. A benchmark tells you whether things are getting better or worse, and for whom.

The Benchmark measures the conditions mothers identify as shaping their family's ability to thrive, and how families experience them. What they need, what they trust, and where they see risk. And because every finding can be cut by income, region, child age, ideology, and more, you see the national number and how differently those conditions land across families.

Count on Mothers is building index infrastructure, a fixed set of core questions asked the same way wave over wave. One wave is a reading. Two waves are a trend. Three are infrastructure.

Founding Membership

What founding members receive

Founding members get the depth beneath the public toplines and the ability to act on it, delivered on a schedule they can plan around. Members are recognized as founding members of the Benchmark.

Founding membership is limited to five institutions.

Wave 1 fielded May 2026, 2,818 U.S. mothers, margin of error plus or minus 2.3 percentage points, weighted to Census benchmarks. The full core instrument and methodology are published.

Advance access. Every wave 15 days ahead of public release, so your team can plan around it.

The standing set of data tables. Every question in the fixed core, across all five indices, delivered as PDF and Excel with each wave.

Curated tables for your priorities. Findings cut across the full demographic battery, income, region, child age, school type, ideology, and more.

The option to place a question in the rotating module. Scoped in conversation, with question language designed and approved by the research team.

An executive briefing with each wave. Delivered by the Count on Mothers research team, scoped to the questions your work turns on.

Rights to cite member findings. Published with attribution, with citation review from the Count on Mothers team.

beyond Membership

Other ways to work with the Benchmark

Some institutions need one question answered rather than a standing subscription. Both are designed, analyzed, and authored by Count on Mothers.

schedule a conversation

Commissioned analysis of wave data. An in depth report drawn from findings already in hand, focused on the questions closest to your policy, program, or product work. Your team sets the priorities. Count on Mothers conducts the analysis and authors the report.

Custom research with a national baseline. A separate survey built around your questions, fielded and analyzed on its own, with a set of Benchmark items repeated so your results can be read against the national measure.

Why it holds up

Three reasons the data holds up

The same questions, every wave

The core instrument is locked at Wave 1. No item changes without a documented rationale, formal review by the research team and Methodology Advisory Board, and a split-sample overlap procedure to establish trend continuity before any item is retired.

A nationally representative sample

Wave 1 draws on a probability-based national panel of mothers, blended with CoM's community panel and raked to Census benchmarks across age, race and ethnicity, household income, education, and region. We publish design effect and effective sample size with every wave, so you can see exactly what the weighting costs in precision.

Real independence

Count on Mothers keeps editorial independence over every finding. Our Methodology Advisory Board advises on the instrument, but the research team alone decides the questions, the analysis, and what we report. That is what lets you cite the data across the political spectrum.

Full methodology, weighting sources, design effect, and effective sample size are published with every wave. Read the methodology.

ACCESS FOR THE FIELD

Put the Benchmark in more hands.

Organizations that want to sustain the Benchmark can fund memberships for organizations whose budgets rarely include research access, including community nonprofits, coalitions, and family-serving organizations working closest to families.

Funding access provides no influence over the research. Survey design, methodology, analysis, and publication remain independently led by Count on Mothers.

Schedule a conversation.

Research collaborators and founding members

Research that institutions can stand behind

The data beneath the findings

The public toplines are a selection from a wider, deeper Benchmark

Each index measures a condition mothers have identified as directly shaping their family's ability to thrive. All five are scored on a 0 to 100 scale, measured the same way every wave, so the readings stay comparable over time.

Maternal Capacity & Stress

The bandwidth mothers have to meet daily demands: perceived stress, time scarcity, coping capacity, and the buffering resources they can draw on.

Family Economic Pressure

Economic strain as a persistent household condition rather than an income threshold: financial strain, childcare and work constraint, healthcare affordability, food security, and care delayed because of cost.

Institutional Trust & Accountability

Whether mothers believe schools, healthcare systems, technology platforms, and government act in families' interests, and whether they feel able to navigate them.

Youth Environment & Commercial Conditions

The structural environments children are embedded in, digital, commercial, and physical: AI and screen engagement, platform and content risk, advertising and harmful-product marketing, green space, and neighborhood safety, alongside mothers' assessment of whether safeguards are adequate.

Child Wellbeing Access & Support

Whether families can reach mental, emotional, and behavioral health support without overwhelming friction, including insurance barriers, provider shortages, and school response, alongside protective factors such as peer friendship.

Rotating module

Each wave adds a supplemental set of timely questions, reported separately from the core indices so the trend lines stay clean. Because they field on the same nationally representative sample, rotating module findings carry the full subgroup architecture and can be cut across every standing dimension below. Founding members have input on module topics.

Each finding can also be examined by subgroup: child age, child gender, number of children, mother's age, region, household income, education, work status, insurance type, race and ethnicity, and political ideology.

Subgroup figures follow standing cell-size rules and are not reported below an unweighted n of 50.

Research integrity

Guardrails that protect credibility

Count on Mothers applies structural safeguards across every engagement and every publicly released finding.

Full research autonomy retained by Count on Mothers

Members do not shape the final questions, the analysis, or the findings.

Clear separation between funding and findings.

Transparent disclosure of financial support.

Fixed national sampling framework and consistent weighting, wave over wave.

The research team alone decides the questions, the analysis, and the findings. Members can raise topics that matter in their field, but they never shape a result.

Wave 1 · May 2026

2,818

1,884

±2.3 pts

Census-raked

Twice a year

What the Benchmark tells you, by sector.

Foundations

Health systems

Employers and coalitions

Policy organizations

Companies serving families

A poll tells you what people think today. A benchmark tells you whether things are getting better or worse, and for whom.

What founding members receive

Other ways to work with the Benchmark

Three reasons the data holds up

The same questions, every wave

A nationally representative sample

Real independence

Put the Benchmark in more hands.

Research that institutions can stand behind

The public toplines are a selection from a wider, deeper Benchmark

Maternal Capacity & Stress

Family Economic Pressure

Institutional Trust & Accountability

Youth Environment & Commercial Conditions

Child Wellbeing Access & Support

Rotating module

Guardrails that protect credibility

Full research autonomy retained by Count on Mothers

Join the founding cohort

The National Benchmark of U.S. Mothers

Wave 1 · May 2026

2,818

1,884

±2.3 pts

Census-raked

Twice a year

What the Benchmark tells you, by sector.

Foundations

Health systems

Employers and coalitions

Policy organizations

Companies serving families

A poll tells you what people think today. A benchmark tells you whether things are getting better or worse, and for whom.

What founding members receive

Other ways to work with the Benchmark

Three reasons the data holds up

The same questions, every wave

A nationally representative sample

Real independence

Put the Benchmark in more hands.

Research that institutions can stand behind

The public toplines are a selection from a wider, deeper Benchmark

Maternal Capacity & Stress

Family Economic Pressure

Institutional Trust & Accountability

Youth Environment & Commercial Conditions

Child Wellbeing Access & Support

Rotating module

Guardrails that protect credibility

Full research autonomy retained by Count on Mothers

Join the founding cohort