How do children view poverty?

Children are aware of their family's poverty despite the best efforts of parents to shield them. Children exercise agency in the consumption of their family's scarce resources. Even at a young age, children are already active in trying to mitigate their family's poverty by not asking for the everyday consumer items that their peers enjoy. As children grow towards adolescence, they employ further behaviours to support the family's finances, often taking on adult roles and responsibilities and missing out on key aspects of childhood. At this age, older children often take responsibility for the care of younger children, allowing parents to go out to work. This is more often the case in countries that have prohibitively expensive and inaccessible childcare, such as the UK. At this age too, older children often find part-time employment to offset their family's poverty, both directly, by at times handing money over to their parents, and indirectly, by paying for the things they need by themselves. Such precocious responsibilities reinforce the disadvantages poverty brings to a young person's capacity to participate fully in their education and in the social and leisure activities of their peers. Some children are particularly vulnerable in this regard; for example, the children of lone parents who may lack wider family support.

What we know about the experience of poverty for children comes from research undertaken with them. It is vital to include the voices of those living in poverty, and of children, in the poverty debate. Too often policies are made about them without them. In this book, I draw on my own long-term studies of families living in poverty, and on the research of others, to provide an understanding of child poverty that keeps children and their families at its core.