It was during the 1990s that policy discourses emerged in response to tackling child poverty and has continued since with a focus on various causes and policies to alleviate it (La Placa and Corlyon, Reference La Placa and Corlyon2015). A timely contribution to the debate has arisen with the publication of ‘Families and Poverty: Everyday Life on a Low Income’ by Mary Daly and Grace Kelly. The book is based on research with a sample of 51 parents into how they construct, negotiate and manage family life and relations in the context of poverty and low income in Northern Ireland. Through rich and detailed qualitative data, the work explores, for example, how families make decisions around resource and capital utilisation regarding the needs and wellbeing of children.

The book explores the important role of friendship networks, neighbours and norms and expectations regarding support. Its most interesting part is its consideration of how low income influences engagement with the local community and the actions and representations that families construct to maintain acceptable ‘local faces’ and ‘public images’. It takes the reader into the private and public lives of families in poverty and depicts lived experiences as well as engaging in academic debates around poverty and welfare reform. For example, there is much focus around processes of money management and the value of planning expenditure according to when money ‘comes in and out’ and the importance of striving to ensure that children do not feel any ‘different’ compared with more affluent ones. In a chapter on representing self and family, respondents inform the reader of how they cope with embarrassment at, for example, opting out of social occasions for lack of money, and the strategies employed to overcome feelings of ‘shame’ and establish legitimacy through recourse to references around people being ‘in the same boat’. ‘Solidarity’ and ‘togetherness’ was also perceived as important. Faced with a shortage of money, parents deemed it important to construct ideal images of families around ‘our family’.

The research is further strengthened through a sophisticated analytical and theoretical framework which locates family relationships within wider structural determinants such as income, economics and local communities. Poverty is perceived as a set of socially constructed processes and relationships relating to accrual and use of personal, familial and structural resources, deemed as adequate to meet needs. One can almost detect elements of Giddens’ (Reference Giddens1984) theory of Structuration, whereby actions and structures are both the medium and outcome of people's abilities to mobilise and reproduce both. Furthermore, the framework is applied to a complex set of domains around the social construction of identities, relationships, and meanings around what constitutes families as objects of public representation in local communities.

Unlike other poverty studies, this book provides an adequate theorisation of the family and proceeds beyond the familiar theories of, for instance, ‘what works’. The focus is on relationships and ‘doing’ family through the lived experiences and narratives of parents on low income. Neither does it use traditional concepts of poverty in terms of relative or absolute, but conceptualises it as a dynamic process. Poverty is a process that is transmitted and experienced through the language of human, financial, social and cultural capital as much as wider structural determinants. The framework assumes an epistemological approach, which perceives individuals as constructing experiences and their surroundings, and their abilities to voice experiences of poverty and marginalisation. The detailed narratives here are also often intertwined with wider structural issues such as unemployment and poorly paid work.

The research does not focus upon power relations within families and linkages between, for instance, class, ethnicity, gender and particularly different cultures (and this is firmly acknowledged by the authors themselves). The authors also dismiss the ‘culture of poverty’ theory, but also observe that parents’ lack of educational qualifications and skills, lower levels of social and cultural capital, and their own previous negative experiences of school, tend to be inter-generationally repeated. This raises questions around how parents influence their children's educational status and to what extent it is a structural or cultural issue.

The book is critical of current government welfare changes, recognising that there will be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of the changes. However, the authors do not rely only on the often used argument that increasing income, either through increased welfare benefits or participation in the labour market is the only solution. Rather, consideration is given to education and training, the condition of local labour markets and the aptitudes of individuals to take up relevant employment, as well as more investment in and integration of local health and social care services. This is important given current economic constraints and electoral considerations, for instance, the decline in support for redistributive welfare and collectivist policies. Whilst the book gives the reader a local and contextual perspective, it might also aid in understanding how these families may be the losers in broader processes of globalisation at the local level and how this may be addressed. Its emphasis upon relationships and human interaction gives policy makers richer evidence beyond traditional economic analysis and assumptions around poverty, health, and emerging concepts of social, material and economic wellbeing (La Placa and Knight, Reference La Placa, Knight, Knight, Placa and McNaught2014).