In this brief, we share survey-based insights on the challenges single mothers face that affect their material and economic stability and family well-being. This survey was fielded to single mothers across the country participating in a national summit held by Jeremiah Program, a national nonprofit organization focused on disrupting the cycle of poverty for single mothers and their children. We highlight results among key groups of single mothers who are known to face particular financial burdens and may benefit from specific policy strategies, including student parents and those parents with young children.

Why This Matters

Ensuring that single-mother-led households can achieve economic stability begins with recognizing and addressing the unique financial and caregiving pressures they face. Doing so will help reduce the material hardships and structural barriers that leave many single mothers and their children economically vulnerable. These economic challenges are expected to increase in the wake of an ongoing affordability crisis and the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which set in motion significant federal funding reductions to critical safety net programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid. Findings from the survey can inform a national conversation about what families need to thrive, especially at a time when financial pressures are reshaping the lived experience of many low and middle-income families across the country.

What We Found

• Child care is a significant challenge for these single mothers. 82 percent of respondents using paid child care reported difficulty making child care payments.
• Barriers to child care impact single mothers’ ability to maintain employment, with 64 percent of respondents reporting barriers to employment due to problems with child care.
• When asked about basic needs, sufficient finances (56 percent), access to career advancement (52 percent), and access to dependable child care (52 percent) were least frequently met.
• Student parents who are also single mothers experience the additional burdens of juggling child care and employment. Over 50 percent of student-parent single mothers reported significant challenges that create barriers to their success at school.
• Respondents reported high levels of material hardship, with 97 percent reporting some type of housing hardship and 85 percent reporting household food insecurity in the past year.

Overall, these survey results indicate that this population of single mothers is experiencing high levels of material and economic hardship. The breadth of hardship and concurrent difficulty achieving stability and accessing opportunity also suggests areas where systems-level supports are needed to strengthen stability and economic mobility for families nationwide.

Substantive changes made to the social safety net after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will be particularly challenging for families with children. These changes will likely increase the level of hardship felt by single mothers across the country, which, in turn, can make it more difficult for them to achieve their goals for themselves and their families.

Despite these challenges, however, single mothers responding to the survey were notably resilient and hopeful for the future. The high number of responses to the survey indicates a high level of engagement among attendees of the Jeremiah Program Summit and reflects a desire in this population to ensure their voices are heard.

How We Did It

The Urban Institute developed and fielded a survey to approximately 2,250 attendees of the Jeremiah Program’s March 2026 Annual Summit Weekend. Our final analytic sample was 1,790 single mother respondents. The survey was distributed via a QR code which was shown to all attendees of the summit attending either in-person and virtually. The survey sample was composed of single mothers who are currently or were in programming with Jeremiah Program, and single mothers connected to other nonprofits across the country. These responses cannot be generalized to the broader population of single mothers in the US, as this population may represent a group that experiences higher rates of hardship and may also be more connected to certain supportive services than other single-parent families.