Percent of NYC Parents By School District Who Prefer Center/School-Based Care or Home-Based Care For Their Children at Age 2
Parents were asked to select the child care option they would want to use most often in a typical week. Source: Survey of 4,306 parents and caregivers of children ages 0-5 living in New York City; conducted by NORC for New America's New Practice Lab, March 31 - April 20, 2026.
Parents want longer parental leave than they had. Recognizing that parental leave can shape whether parents are able to care for their children during the earliest months of life, the survey also asked parents about their experiences of parental leave after their youngest child was born — and how much leave they would like to have if money and job security were not concerns. Leave-taking varies significantly based on gender, household income, and race and ethnicity. But NYC parents with young children, irrespective of those same demographic charac- teristics, want more parental leave on average than they had — consistent with the finding that most want a parent to be their child’s primary caregiver during their first year. Overall, four in five parents would have wanted more leave than they had. Among parents who were employed when their youngest child was born, 86 percent took parental leave from work, while 14 percent did not. Lower-income parents (26 percent of parents with income below 200 percent of FPL compared to 9 percent of parents at or above that threshold), dads (20 per- cent compared to 8 percent of moms), Black, Hispanic, and AAPI parents (20 percent, 16 percent, and 14 percent, respectively, compared to 9 percent of white parents) were more likely to have not taken any parental leave following their child’s birth. Among those parents who did take parental leave, 55
THE 2026 NEW YORK CITY PARENT SURVEY : WHAT CHILD CARE PARENTS WANT 19
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