This is the second edited collection providing an analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). The MCS is the fourth national cohort study of its kind surveying around 18,800 babies (from about 18,500 families) born in the UK. This book provides the first longitudinal analysis based on the first three sweeps: sweep one when children were between 9–12 months of age, sweep two when they were age three years and sweep three when they were age five years (the age at which they would start compulsory education). Sweep three was conducted in 2006 and the fourth in 2008, with more to follow.

The value of the book is threefold: first it provides a unique and detailed longitudinal analysis of the complexity and fluidity of family life in the first five years of life. Second, it assesses the potential impact of many aspects of life on children's cognitive and behavioural development as measured at ages three and five. Third, it is methodologically rich with multiple approaches to longitudinal analysis and innovative usage of indicators to measure cognitive and behavioural development.

It covers an impressive range of topics over 15 substantive chapters all to a similarly high standard, though there is variation in the sophistication and complexity of the analyses. Given the breadth of topics and their interconnectedness, it is difficult to know how to read it as a collection (reading chapters as standalone pieces would I think fail to do the book sufficient justice). The editors provide some suggestions; read it sequentially and you will be taken on a journey from the child's home, to neighbourhood, to parents’ workplace, to school and back home again. Or it can be read in any order. Alternatively, I would suggest a thematic approach, I felt this would be more beneficial for readers but the interrelationship across topics makes this difficult. Here is my thematic attempt: poverty is an important/main topic in chapters 2, 5 and 9, employment as a route out of poverty is a current policy concern and parental employment patterns and childcare usage are focused upon in chapters 6 and 8. Early child development outcomes and understanding the way various factors might influence them are explored in the following chapters: chapter 4 (quality of parental relationship and parenting involvement), chapter 5 (family transitions), chapter 9 (family income levels), chapter 10 (child's ethnicity), chapter 12 (differences in Foundation Stage Profiles at age five) and chapter 14 (resilience factors mediating financial hardship). Two chapters deal explicitly with the idea of intergenerational transmission: chapter 9 provides a complex analysis based partly on comparisons with other cohort studies to explore the relationship between children's development outcomes in the early years and family income and how this might potentially affect intergenerational social mobility, chapter 15 explores transmission pathways of parental health on child health and well-being outcomes. The remaining chapters pertain to the experience of modern childhood; ‘ethnic diversity, neighbourhood and maternal experience of racism’, ‘residential mobility and neighbourhood’ and ‘school choice’ are covered respectively in chapters 3, 7 and 11 and the risk factors related to children's overweight/obesity are examined in chapter 13.

We learn many important things about children's first five years of life in the early part of the twenty-first century. We learn in chapter 2 that a substantial proportion of children were living below the income poverty threshold at any one of the sweeps (around 30 per cent). Also, based on four dimensions of poverty at age five, only 40 per cent of children were defined as ‘not poor’ on all four dimensions, 28 per cent were ‘truly poor’ on all four and the remainder were poor on combinations of two dimensions. But there was a differential risk of being ‘deprived poor’ as opposed to being ‘money poor’ by ethnic group. Yet, whilst a core group remained in ‘persistent poverty’ over the three sweeps (27 per cent income or subjectively poor and 5 per cent poor on both), there was churning of families. Around similar proportions moved in and out of poverty and the two most influential factors were changes in the numbers of earners and changes in partnership status. So relationship breakdown was a route into poverty as was repartnering a potential, but not guaranteed, route out of poverty for lone mothers (even if they did not earn themselves).

Family transitions and poverty therefore were important features of life and for the first time the complexity and fluidity of transitions are captured in chapter 5. It confirms that marriage is more stable than cohabitation (in the early years at least) but this stability is further differentiated by mothers’ ethnicity. There was a gradient of risk of poverty; those at least risk were the continuously married or married following a period of cohabitation, followed by continuous cohabiters. The group most likely to be poor were solo mothers. However, there was little difference in emotional well-being among mothers and children living in married or stable cohabiting unions. Importantly, the causal direction of all these associations is unknown. So it is not marriage per se that causes better outcomes. Making a transition from one state to another did have differential effects on child well-being. Behavioural problems were more evident among children who experienced certain types of family transitions compared to those who had none. Thus, parental relationship status at birth and later family transitions are significant, but the authors caution that there are likely to be many underlying factors affecting relationship status and impacting on child and maternal well-being outcomes. Chapter 4 also demonstrates a direct relationship between perceptions of the quality of parental relationship and child outcomes and between involved parenting and child outcomes; although only a small proportion of the variance in outcomes is explained.

We also learn in chapter 9 that there is a strong association between income levels and children's cognitive ability and behaviours with the gap in vocabulary scores being about one year between high- and low-income groups. However, there is little evidence to show that this ‘disadvantage gap’ has been reduced over time when a comparison is made with children born to cohort parents in the National Child Development Study and The British Cohort Study). As pointed out in chapter 14, it is difficult to know ‘how’ the experience of hardship/low income influences child outcomes. Even so, the analysis in chapter 4 shows that mothers’ having positive self-esteem, good mental health and warm relationships with their child can protect against economic hardship. So family structure and transitions, employment and income levels matter for child outcomes in the early years, but so does the quality of parental relationships and parenting behaviours, and the mothers’ positive well-being can even provide some protection against the influence of economic hardship. This is a ‘must read’ book for those interested in the MCS, child well-being, ethnic diversity and modern family life.