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This review of 10 years of qualitative research with disadvantaged children in the UK shows that despite some gaps in the knowledge base, there is now a substantive body of evidence exploring children's lives and experiences from their own perspectives. The review reveals that poverty penetrates deep into the heart of childhood, permeating every facet of children's lives from economic and material disadvantage, through the structuring and limiting of social relationships and social participation to the most personal often hidden aspects of disadvantage associated with shame, sadness and the fear of social difference and marginalisation. Ó

Lone mothers are a key target group for government policies to increase employment participation rates. Employment sustainability is central to achieving this goal and thus it is important to understand the factors that affect sustainability. When the lone mother starts work, her daily life changes in various ways, and so do the lives of her children, and perhaps also other family members who may become involved in childcare, or in other forms of help. These social relationships -at home, in work, in care settings, at school -may be a key element in employment sustainability, and one that has not yet been systematically explored in research. This article draws on data from an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study of lone mothers and their children, which has been following the families from the point that the mothers left income support and started working for at least 16 hours per week. The analysis starts from the assumption that sustaining work over time is a process that actively involves the family as a whole and not just the individual lone mother. In this article we explore how social relationships, inside and outside the family, are central to the 'family-work project' of sustaining employment.

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This article presents new empirical findings from a qualitative, longitudinal study of lowincome working family life. It explores the experiences and perceptions of a group of children living in low-income, working, lone-mother households. Their accounts disclose the impact on children's everyday lives of their mothers' move into low-paid employment following a period out of the labour market. Children's accounts show that their mothers' move into work had brought significant economic and social change to their lives. How children experienced their mothers' employment and made sense of changes in family life was mediated by a range of different factors including their age, changes in income and security, changes in family time and family practices, child care, and their perceptions of maternal wellbeing. The findings also reveal that children, as active social agents, were engaged in a complex range of caring and coping strategies that endeavoured to ease some of the pressures that low-income working life could generate in their family lives. The article concludes with a discussion about the implications of the findings for policy, particularly in relation to the quality of social and economic support that lone mothers and their children receive.