Grandparents put $900 billion into raising American kids every year, and roughly 81% of that — $731 billion — is unpaid labor that never shows up on a pay stub, tax return, or GDP report. That figure comes from AARP’s June 2026 research on what the organization is calling the “grandparent economy,” built from a … Read more
Fifty-four percent of American parents now rate the overall conditions for raising a family in this country as “just fair” or “poor” — and their kids, when asked the same question separately, land in almost the same place at 56%. The numbers come from Common Sense Media’s 2026 “The State of Kids and Families in … Read more
Government regulation now adds $131,734 to the price of a brand-new single-family home — 26.4% of the $499,500 average sales price — and that figure has jumped more than 40% in just five years. The number comes from the National Association of Home Builders’ “Government Regulation in the Price of a Home” special study, released … Read more
Homebuilders are steering fewer projects toward the biggest cities in the country, and the shift has gone on long enough now that it counts as a trend rather than a blip. Fresh data from the National Association of Home Builders shows single-family construction in the core counties of major metro areas has lost ground for … Read more
Lowe’s cut the top end of its full-year sales outlook after a second quarter in which shoppers kept skipping do-it-yourself projects even as professional contractors kept spending, the company said in its Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings report. The revision lands exactly one week after Home Depot told investors the opposite: that smaller projects were driving … Read more
Six. That’s the average number of grandchildren the typical American grandparent has today, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis published September 9, just days before Grandparents Day. Some have a lot more than six: 14% of grandparents report more than ten grandchildren, while 24% have just one or two. Averages flatten a family … Read more
A folded scrap of paper signed by three sisters — Lucy, Maggie, and Eleanor Edel — sat wedged inside a hollow staircase post for 101 years before a home renovator named Nikk Alcaraz finally pried it loose this past summer. Alcaraz documents the restoration of his century-old Victorian house in southwestern Pennsylvania under the name … Read more
Three out of every four high school students say they consistently feel stressed, and half of middle schoolers report the same, according to figures published by the American Institute of Stress. Those numbers land every August and September, right as backpacks come out of closets, and they’re consistently higher than most parents expect. The instinct … Read more
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has used a legal power it hadn’t touched in almost 40 years to order an immediate stop to sales and use of Lakkzoom immersion water heaters, small $30 devices meant to heat water in a bucket or bathtub, after linking them to 235 fire reports. In a news release, CPSC … Read more
Florida homeowners are now paying an average of $8,292 a year for home insurance, nearly three times the $2,948 national average, and the state still leads the country in a second, less-discussed number: the share of claims that get closed with nothing paid out at all. The most expensive state, by a wide margin According … Read more