For foundations, health systems, employers, and policy and product organizations

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Count on Mothers

The National Benchmark of U.S. Mothers is a recurring, nationally representative read on the conditions mothers say shape their family's ability to thrive, and what families need, trust, and prioritize as a result. Founding members get the full depth beneath the public findings, and put it to work inside their own teams.

Wave 1 is live. Released July 15, 2026.
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Wave 1 · May 2026

Latest wave

2,818

mothers surveyed

1,884

Effective n

±2.3 pts

Margin of error, 95% CI

Census-raked

Weighting

Twice a year

Cadence
Who it is for

One benchmark, put to work five ways

Foundations

Track whether conditions for the families your grantees serve are improving, with data that works across the aisle and enters the public record. No co-branding required.

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 Census region and 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, which is the breakdown policy teams ask for most.

Companies serving families

For the brands, financial firms, and product teams whose customers aremothers and families -- understand what they trust, need, and worry about,with independent data you 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 not just the national number but 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.

Founding membership is open only to institutions joining during the Benchmark's establishment phase.
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Advance access to each wave before it goes public
Standing findings across all five indices, wave over wave, as the trend line builds from the Wave 1 baseline
Custom subgroup analysis on request, within reportable cell sizes
Input on rotating module topics
Executive briefings from the Count on Mothers research team
Recognition as a founding supporter of the infrastructure
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.

Research collaborators and founding members

Independent research 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.

Next steps

Put the Benchmark to work

Count on Mothers is convening a small founding cohort as the National Benchmark becomes lasting, recurring research infrastructure. If your work depends on knowing how mothers and families are really doing, this is where it starts.
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countonmothers.org/partners · lprentiss@countonmothers.org
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