Editor’s note: This blog post has been updated to reflect the correct number of parent and caregiver survey respondents for 2023.
The Best Starts for Kids Health Survey is a survey of King County families with children in elementary school or younger to learn about their health, well-being, strengths, and needs. The survey is an important tool that helps us guide the Best Starts initiative and understand the changing needs and strengths of King County families.
We conducted the survey in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023. In 2023, 5,865 parents and caregivers participated in the survey, bringing the overall number of parent and caregiver respondents across the four survey rounds to 24,738. The 2023 sample was diverse in terms of race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, geography, and languages spoken other than English.
Check out the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey Demographics Dashboard to explore the demographics of survey respondents.
Learnings from the 2023 Best Starts for Kids Health Survey
Best Starts builds on the strengths of King County families and communities to ensure babies and children are happy, healthy, safe, and thriving. But how do we know if families are thriving? We measure an interwoven set of supports that address basic and social needs. These supports are called protective factors, which are directly linked to better well-being for children, their families, and their communities. Protective factors are a useful strengths-based tool to understand where we can provide more supports for families.
Check out three key learnings in our Families Thrive one-pager. Additional data and survey results are available on the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey Dashboard. Keep an eye out on our blog – we’ll be sharing additional key health survey findings soon!
Review the Families Thrive one-pager in: Amharic, Arabic, Korean, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Traditional Chinese, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
