Inseparable Puts Mothers' Mental Health on the Policy Map

New national data shows who goes without when a family can’t afford all the care it needs, and the advocacy organization working to change it.

There is a quiet arithmetic happening in American homes. When a family cannot afford all the care it needs, someone gets cut from the list. New national data tells us who it is: the mother.

That data exists in part because Inseparable, the bipartisan mental health advocacy organization, signed on as a founding member of the Count on Mothers National Benchmark, a bet that you cannot fix what you have not measured. The first results, “Mothers See it First: Wave 1 of the National Benchmark of U.S. Mothers,” landed this week, and they are hard to shake.

When cost forces a choice, nearly a third of mothers (32 percent) delayed or skipped their own physical or mental healthcare. Fewer than 6 percent postponed only their child’s care. Mothers are not neglecting their kids. They are shielding them, and paying for it with their own health.

Caitlin Hochul, Senior Vice President of Policymaker Relations at Inseparable, says the findings confirm what the organization has long argued: mental healthcare remains out of reach for families across the country, and no mother should have to choose between her own care and her child’s.

The wall families hit

Nearly 4 in 10 mothers say their child needed mental, emotional, or behavioral help in the past year, and among those who went looking, 47 percent had trouble getting it. That is roughly half of families hitting a wall the moment a child is struggling.

Money is only part of the story. Almost half of mothers (49.6 percent) had difficulty tending to their own mental health in the past month, and among them, 49 percent said time, not cost, was the biggest obstacle. You cannot keep an appointment you have no hour to attend.

The financial fragility underneath all of this is easy to overlook. Among mothers whose youngest child is 13 to 15, 41 percent say a single surprise $500 bill would put them into debt.

Hochul, who spent more than a decade in policy and communications before joining Inseparable (including spearheading a national task force on workforce mental health), connects that number directly to the insurance system.

“Private insurers are not covering the care that these families need, and it’s hard for these families to make the payments out of pocket. Forty-one percent of families would have to go into debt over a surprise $500 bill. That could be an out-of-pocket cost for receiving mental health care — and that’s going to drive somebody into debt. That’s really alarming.”

A new name at the bottom of the trust list

The survey also picked up something newer. Sixty-five percent of mothers report little or no trust in AI companies, the lowest score among 11 institutions tested. Among mothers whose kids use AI for more than entertainment, 62 percent worry it could weaken their child’s ability to think independently and solve problems.

Hochul reads the shift as significant.

“Many moms feel uninformed about how their kids are actually using AI, which is concerning,” Hochul says. “There’s strong concern that they’re being fed inappropriate content, or marketed illegal things, or fed information that promotes self-harm. When we polled on which organizations are most trusted or least trusted, by and large moms picked AI companies as the ones they trust the least — even more than insurance companies.”

That is a notable reordering. The industry mothers distrusted most a year ago has been displaced.

From data to policy

None of this is a story about individual failure. It is a story about a system that quietly asks mothers to absorb its gaps.

Inseparable is pushing on the exact barriers this data exposes through Care That’s Fair, a national campaign to end insurance practices that deny, delay, and limit mental health care. The campaign presses state and federal lawmakers to improve coverage, eliminate barriers, and make treatment affordable enough that no family is forced to forgo it, and Hochul’s role is to carry findings like these into the rooms where those decisions get made.

The Benchmark itself is built for the long game. Led by a PhD and MPH research team and supported by a Methodology Advisory Board at University College London, Wave 1 surveyed 2,818 mothers in May 2026. The same questions return in future waves, so each measure becomes a trend rather than a snapshot.

“Mothers see the whole of a family’s life at once, which means they see pressure building before any system does,” says Jennifer Bransford, Founder & CEO of Count on Mothers.

The takeaway is not complicated: make mental healthcare easier to reach and easier to afford, and fewer mothers will be forced to put themselves last. Inseparable is betting that repeatable evidence is what finally moves lawmakers to do it.