With a fresh approach to insurance sales and a modern tech stack, Toggle, a Farmers’ Insurance Company, is focused on simplifying the purchase journey. Watch Industry Voices: Spotlight on Financial Services with Toggle’s Josh LaRoche, research and marketing director, to hear how empowering policyholders has helped its parent company innovate.

About a third of K-12 students have already returned to class amid a fourth COVID-19 wave. While, earlier this year, analysts had predicted a very optimistic back-to-school (BTS) season for retailers and brands, not all is lost: Many parents still want to make school-related firsts and rites of passage as “normal” as possible for their children.

This report examines pain points of modern-day parenthood—from work/life balance to screen time to division of household labor—which were plentiful before the coronavirus pandemic (though aggravated by it) and will persist beyond it.

Of the $32.5 billion that US parents will spend on back-to-school purchases this year, $2.9 billion will go toward pandemic-related items, such as hand sanitizer and furniture for learning spaces at home. These products, along with the collective tech category, will see about a 40% spending increase, while expenditures on clothing and accessories will decline for the second year in a row.

Mother's Day spending climbs toward $30 billion

Are parents working hard or hardly getting by?

Among Hispanic working parents and primary caregivers in a Brookings Institution/Abriendo Puertas/Latino Decisions survey in June 2020, 52% reported such cuts while keeping their jobs. Often lacking seniority, younger Hispanics have been vulnerable to this.

Parents can facilitate allowances through its Chores feature, which sets up and tracks progress on tasks assigned to their children. The app also provides parents with real-time spending updates, and enables them to freeze a card and restrict payments to specific businesses.