Second, we wished to focus on children as social actors. Many social surveys gather statistics on children primarily as members of families or households. A drawback of this approach is
1 For example the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey, the Kidscreen initiative and the Young Lives studythat children’s status becomes defined by their household or family status and this may not reflect their personal experience. For example, a household may be defined as ‘not in poverty’ on the basis of household income, but a child in that household may still experience material deprivation depending on the spending choices that adults in the household make. It has been argued for some time2 that children should be a ‘unit of observation’ in social accounting. As we will see in Chapter 3 this issue has become particularly pertinent in some countries where substantial minorities of children no longer live in a single household.