Introduction

The ages of 5-15 are the compulsory years of schooling in Britain. Many children begin schooling a little earlier and most now carry on a little later, but these are the years at which almost all are in school and thus it makes sense to combine them. We know that almost all children spend their days with other children aged 5-15 and mostly live with a parent or parents, but within which social worlds are schoolchildren really growing up in Britain?

Here we look into the homes, lives and neighbourhoods of Britain’s older children: where the mode live in neighbourhoods where their parents do not work, and the few in areas where most have one breadwinner. We show how these exceptions are islands in a sea of uniformity where typically both mum and dad are at work, at least for a lot of the time, when the children are at school. ‘What does your mum do?’ is as sensible a question in most of Britain today as asking father’s occupation of a child a couple of generations ago.

We move on to show where you would be wise not to ask about a child’s father’s occupation, where the odds are high that there is no father at home, and show how that mixes with the patterns of parents’ or parent’s employment. Then we turn to the main and largely hidden repercussion of lone parenthood: the transformation to step-childhood and how it shows a surprisingly different geography. If daddy was a rolling stone, mummy is more likely than ever to have moved on and out of the cities with a new man. Thus the sea of apparent two-parent uniformity with which this chapter begins is something of an illusion. However, simply by looking at where original parents cohabit against where reconstitution of families occurs, the boundaries of two different kinds of family life can be seen etched across the map of Britain. There are two very different ways for parents to ‘live in sin’ today and different places for such living to happen. It is not just that as children age their families leave cities; much more is going on than that.