Access to basic material resources, including food, housing, utilities, healthcare, and child care, is essential for the well-being of families and the healthy development of young children. When families struggle to meet these needs, the resulting material hardship can undermine family stability, increase parental stress, and create challenges for children’s social and emotional development (Conger et al., 2002; Neppl et al., 2016). These risks may be particularly consequential during early childhood, a developmental period in which children’s environments and caregiving experiences play a central role in shaping long-term outcomes (Yoshikawa et al., 2012).
In California, recent economic conditions have raised growing concerns about families’ ability to maintain stable access to these essential resources. Rising housing costs, increasing prices for basic goods, and uncertainty surrounding public benefits have placed additional pressure on household budgets (Baldassare et al., 2024; Kimberlin & Rose, 2017). Although income-based indicators are commonly used to assess economic vulnerability, they do not always capture the day-to-day challenges families face in maintaining stable living conditions. Measures of material hardship, on the other hand, provide an important complementary perspective on family economic well-being (Gershoff et al., 2007). Rather than focusing solely on income levels, hardship measures capture whether families experience difficulties paying for basic necessities such as food, housing, utilities, healthcare, or child care. These experiences offer a more direct reflection of families’ lived economic conditions and may help identify challenges that are not visible through income measures alone.
Among these basic needs, access to affordable child care represents a distinct challenge for families with young children. The high cost of child care in California can place substantial financial strain on household budgets and force families to make difficult trade-offs between employment, caregiving, and other essential expenses. Difficulty affording child care may therefore represent a key pathway through which broader economic pressures translate into both material hardship and increased family stress.
Within this broader context of economic pressure, access to affordable early childhood care and education (ECE) represents an important support for families with young children. Early learning programs can promote children’s development while also enabling parents to participate in the workforce and maintain financial stability (Yoshikawa et al., 2016). In California, the state has expanded investments in early learning through the Transitional Kindergarten (TK) program, a publicly funded pre-kindergarten year offered through public schools. By providing free early learning opportunities, TK has the potential to reduce child care costs for families while supporting children’s developmental needs.
Despite growing attention to the affordability challenges facing California families, there is limited timely evidence documenting how families with young children are currently experiencing material hardship and emotional distress, and how families perceive and engage with early learning supports such as TK within the context of these economic pressures. Families navigating economic hardship must make trade-offs between meeting basic needs and securing stable care for their children, with the cost of child care representing a distinct and policy-relevant pressure. In this context, programs such as TK may serve not only as developmental opportunities for children but also as potential supports that help families manage material hardship and caregiving demands. Bringing these domains together addresses an important gap by linking families’ lived economic experiences – including challenges related to child care affordability – with their perspectives on policy-relevant supports designed to promote child development and family stability.
As such, the current study examines experiences of material hardship among families with young children in California using data from the RAPID California Voices Survey. Specifically, this analysis pursues four objectives. First, it examines the prevalence of material hardship among California families with young children. Second, it examines how hardship experiences vary across key sociodemographic characteristics, including household income levels, geographic locations, family structures, and the presence of a child with a disability. Third, it documents the prevalence of emotional distress among parents and young children across these family characteristics. Fourth, it examines parents’ awareness of, interest in, and experiences with California’s publicly funded TK early learning program and explores how families perceive TK as a support for children and family well-being. By providing timely information about the economic and emotional experiences of families with young children, this report aims to inform policies and programs designed to support family stability and healthy child development in California.
