SparkyData

NYC Families with Young Children: Census Microdata

Public-use microdata from the article “Raising a child in New York”

Not synthetic. Disclosure-protected survey records published by a government statistical agency, cut to the people or households we looked at.

Records
Public-use microdata
Place
New York City
Version
1.6.1,
Licence
CC BY 4.0; code MIT
Built for
Raising a child in New York (version 1.6.1)

Fewer New Yorkers are raising small children: about 543,000 under six lived in the five boroughs in 2024, 116,000 fewer than in 2015, and births kept falling into 2026. Seven in ten of those living with a parent have every resident parent in the labor force, and before age three, when public help is thinnest, a year of care at the State's rate fits the 7% yardstick for one family in eight.

The article's own data file, microdata cut to what it analyses, and the script that computes every figure in it. Computed from: ACS 2015–2024 one-year PUMS: residents of the five boroughs from the New York file, leavers from the national file; Census Bureau population estimates by age, Vintage 2020 and Vintage 2025; OCFS market rates effective 1 October 2024; State Health Department births by county of residence 2010–2023 and the City Health Department's provisional births to March 2026; DOE demographic snapshot 2025-26; CPS basic monthly files June 2024 to August 2026.

Files

FileRowsSizeWhat it holds
data.csv 72,193 7.8 MB The microdata the article's figures are computed from.
analysis.py 76 KB The script that computes every figure in the article (MIT).

Columns

data.csv: The data (30 columns)

row_id, year, weight, record, status, borough, destination, age, sex, race_ethnicity, foreign_born, own_child, parents_arrangement, enrolled_in_school_3_4, public_school_3_4, parent, youngest_child_age, in_labor_force, employed, works_35_hours_plus, gave_birth_past_year, childcare_workforce_group, hourly_earnings_2024, household_income_2024, household_income_excluding_own_2024, income_band, owner, renter, below_poverty, rent_burdened. The article and its script define each one.

Sources

Licence and credit

The survey records are the publishing agency's, redistributed as published; the columns we derived are CC BY 4.0; the script is MIT. Public-use microdata are disclosure-protected records derived from survey responses, published by the issuing agency so that no respondent can be identified; synthetic records are generated by SparkyData and correspond to no real person, household or address. Neither may be used to identify anyone.

Credit it as:

SparkyData (2026). NYC Families with Young Children: Census Microdata (version 1.6.1). Data CC BY 4.0.
https://sparkydata.dev/data/nyc-families-with-young-children-census-microdata

The article gives the charts, the uncertainty of each comparison and a changelog. Corrections and questions: sparkytech.dev@gmail.com, or see corrections.