The purpose of this themed section is to bring together a set of papers that highlight children's perspectives of poverty and disadvantage. The articles selected explore the experiences, paid and unpaid resource contributions, and perspectives of children who face economic adversity in different countries across a range of diverse settings. They reveal some of the complexity of children's lives using different methodological approaches drawn from a spectrum of qualitative research with disadvantaged children that is growing and changing as it responds to new and innovative ways of engaging with children. The themed section includes findings from a qualitative longitudinal study in the UK, findings from a survey of children's views in Norway that includes a qualitative component, and snapshots across time from seven years of research with working children in Indonesia. These papers, coupled with an extensive review of the growing body of literature on children's perspectives on poverty present a valuable insight into a developing field of research.

While child poverty, measured according to standard household income and consumption measures, has decreased in many countries in recent years, it is now clear that, in even the richest countries, significant numbers of children still experience economic adversity and deprivation, lack the educational opportunities appropriate to their needs, or face exclusion from activities that other children take for granted, or live in areas where formal and informal support structures are limited.

Although past poverty research has been dominated by income studies of ‘statistical poverty’, a consensus has emerged that to fully understand the underlying causes, outcomes and dynamic nature of poverty there is a need for more than an income-based measure. The income approach creates problems in relation to the ambiguities (and indeed politicised debates) surrounding where to set the poverty line, the lack of agreement about how to apply the equivalence adjustment and the difficulty of accurate measurement and reporting of income itself. Above all, income poverty studies fail to connect with the realities of poverty because they reveal nothing about the living standards actually experienced. Therefore, to understand the lived experience of poverty and the powerful social and relational dynamics that accompany economic disadvantage, it is important to engage in a meaningful way with those who are experiencing it.

The voices of economically disadvantaged people are now starting to be heard in policy and practice, although the development of meaningful research with economically disadvantaged children has been particularly slow in coming. The reasons for this lie in part in the duality of their social status as both children and as impoverished citizens. Traditionally, children have been cast as passive ‘objects’ of research rather than active subjects with their own voices and perspectives, and children by virtue of being children are socially and politically powerless. They are largely dependent on adults for their economic and social welfare and they are easily overlooked or obscured within their family settings. As a consequence, the marginalised social and political status of poverty, coupled with the low and dependent status of childhood, means that disadvantaged children have tended to be doubly silenced, and their experiences and the issues that concern them have largely remained unheard.

However, there is now a growing body of international research which recognises children's agency and the complexities of their interactions with family, peers, school and community. Informed in part by the new sociology of childhood, which posits children as competent social actors, and by the growth of children's rights and the new politics of participation, this body of research has the potential to bring children's voices and experiences to the very centre of the political stage. This in turn can lead to better policy making through the formulation of coherent, informed policies for disadvantaged children and their families across a wide range of policy areas, including poverty reduction, employment, education, social assistance and health.

Each of the articles in this themed section examine what it means to be in poverty from the perspective of children and adolescents and addresses key areas of policy. In the case of Ridge's article the underpinning policy context is the UK government's attempts to eradicate child poverty, especially through the medium of welfare to work policies for lone mothers. The article explores children's perspectives on the everyday challenges of living in a low-income working lone-parent family. The article is drawn from findings generated by a larger qualitative longitudinal study of low-income working family life, which has engaged with children and their lone mothers over a period of four to five years. The focus is on children who have experienced considerable changes in their social, economic and familial lives as their mothers’ attempts to sustain low-income employment have faltered. This has resulted in children experiencing episodes of their mother's employment and unemployment over a span of several years. The article reveals that when mothers entered employment there was an expectation from children that their lives would improve and in some cases – although not all – that was the case and children experienced increases in income, social activities and social status. However, their mother's employment was not without costs for children, especially in terms of reduced family time, changes in family practices, the need to resolve care issues and increased stress for their mothers. The longitudinal nature of the study shows that mothers were often working in highly unstable labour markets and children had acute anxieties about the economic and social consequences of the shift between work and unemployment. For some children, secure employment never materialised for their mothers, and over time they became less interested in their mothers returning to work. In other cases, dislike of some aspects of their mother's employment was addressed by mothers returning to employment under different circumstances, including reduced hours. With lone mothers increasingly pressured to enter low-paid employment in the UK and elsewhere, often in unstable labour market conditions, the effects of repeated movements in and out of the labour market on their children's lives is an important issue for policy. It is clear from children's accounts that, whilst an increase in income and social participation is an essential need for children, the circumstances under which work is undertaken, and the uncertainties and insecurities that unstable work transitions can generate, can have an adverse effects on children's lives and their perceptions of the value of work.

Sandbaek's article also deals with relationships between children and their parents, and touches on the impact of poverty on intra-familial relationships. The study draws on both qualitative and quantitative longitudinal survey data from Norway to report on disadvantaged and more affluent children's perspectives on their well-being and social integration across a range of dimensions. Focusing on the perspectives of low-income children, the article explores how children view their parents and the type of support they feel they gain from them under adverse circumstances. Comparing the responses of low-income children with more affluent children in Norway, she finds that, while low-income children try to protect their parents by reducing and monitoring their needs, there are also signs that income disadvantage can result in stress, and, for some children, poorer relationships with their parents. However, as Sandbaek argues, unhappy children may be more critical of their parents and feel their family economy is poor; conversely, negative relationships between parents and children may result in unhappy children. Sandbaek's data reveal the need for considerably more attention to be given to children's perspectives on family relationships. This is especially the case given the increasing development of policy interventions in family life – driven in part by social investment policies – and the fundamental need for adequate and appropriate support for impoverished children and their families. As Sandbaek argues, information from children and young people themselves is vital if there is to be a more nuanced and informed insight into the complex linkages between parent–child relationships and resource distributions within disadvantaged families.

Family relationships also play a key role in understanding the lives and experiences of working children in Bessell's study. Based on research between 1994 and 1999 on working children in Jakarta, Indonesia, this article turns the spotlight on to the role of work in impoverished children's lives. The article discusses disadvantaged children's attitudes to work in Indonesia, and examines how children view their employment and whether for these children work is associated purely with poverty, or whether other factors are influencing their labour supply decisions. Bessel's work, like the articles that precede it, reveals the complexity of children's lives and the multidimensional nature of childhood poverty and exclusion. The key factor in children's work decisions was their lack of income, and like children in previous research, they sought money from work to meet both basic needs and familial needs, but also for some consumption items to fit in with prevailing norms. However, while poverty was a driving factor in children's engagement with work, the article reveals that this was one factor among a complex set of pressures and constraints that shaped their lives and those of their families. The experience of work and poverty was mediated by children's diverse circumstances, and the relationship between work and poverty was viewed very differently by children according to their circumstances. For some, employment offered an opportunity to gain control over economic resources, albeit very low ones. For these children, employment had the potential to provide choice and for some, especially boys working in the informal economy, a degree of independence. Employment also opened up choices for girls, who through their factory work gained a greater measure of control over their lives than they could otherwise expect, although these choices did not extend to their conditions of work. For other children, family obligations and constrained choices in work gave little opportunity for independence and control. These impacts can be reinforced by policies designed to affect adults that end up constraining children's options and/or send powerful messages about children's roles that can reinforce their sense of alienation. However, despite significant burdens of family responsibilities, these children often expressed a sense of pride in the role of their employment in family survival. For children in the most extreme deprivation, there was little sense that employment was a strategy for taking some control, but rather that work and poverty were relentless pressures which offered little prospect of reward or respite. Bessel's research highlights the value of incorporating children's perspectives in policy making to improve insight and understanding into poverty, gendered aspects of disadvantage and children's work.

The final article in the section is a review by Redmond that summarises the main trends evident in the growing literature on children's perspectives on poverty and explores the notion of agency by examining how literature and research approach children's agency in relation to disadvantage. He categorised children's agency in a number of ways, including self-exclusion (children excluding themselves from participation in activities that other children take for granted or from a range of aspirations for their future lives); exclusion of children by other children (children excluding other children because of their poverty); getting by (everyday actions by children to cope in small ways with their situation, and to help their families cope); and getting out (children taking steps towards getting themselves and their families out of poverty). Examples of all four can be found in the three preceding articles, highlighting their relevance and value. Redmond's article reminds us that this is a relatively new field of study and, whilst early studies have established the importance of recognising children as active social agents and valuing and acknowledging their engagement with poverty in the context of their social and familial lives, he cautions us that there is still much that we do not know, particularly in relation to children's lives outside of the family setting. He argues that there is a need for systematic studies to discover how children themselves define poverty, their perceptions of need in childhood and the inclusion of their perspectives in the development of indicators of childhood well-being and deprivation.

The articles in this themed section reveal the damaging and pervasive effects of hardship in childhood. Poverty penetrates every aspect of children's lives, mapping on to their everyday economic, social and familial experiences and moulding and shaping their lives. However, they also reveal that children are active in trying to mediate and make sense of their experiences and are often engaged in managing, negotiating and seeking to control the experience of deprivation where and when they can.

Children living in poverty (and their families) are some of the most intensively governed groups in society, frequently the object of political and social concern, but also often subject to intense official scrutiny and measures of control. The development of research, which presents the experiences, opinions and concerns of children themselves, has an important role to play in ensuring that policies targeted at children in poverty are meaningful and appropriate for addressing the lifeworlds of the children they are intending to support. Without this key subjective dimension, such policies may fail to deliver any significant or lasting change in children's circumstances.