If we found seven typical 5-year-olds to represent today’s UK, who would they be? What would their stories reveal?
Seven Children is about injustice and hope. Danny Dorling’s highly original book constructs seven ‘average’ children from millions of statistics—each child symbolising the very middle of a parental income bracket, from the poorest to the wealthiest. Dorling’s seven were born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression and became Europe’s most socially divided nation. They turned 5 in 2023, amid a devastating cost-of-living crisis. Their country has Europe’s fastest-rising child poverty rates, and even the best-off of the seven is disadvantaged. Yet aspirations endure.
Immersive, surprising and thought-provoking, Seven Children gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing issues. What do we miss when we focus only on the superrich and the most deprived? What kinds of lives are British children living between the extremes? Why are most British parents on below-average income? Who are today’s real middle class? And how can we reverse the trends leaving all children worse off than their parents?
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Seven Children 9781911723509 Paperback
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Seven Children purchased from the Guardian bookstore
Poor ordering and delivery process with no tracking capability, the book is very poorly printed with some pages so lightly printed it’s not possible to read them. As for the content, I’m finding it somewhat tedious. While the attempt to make the appalling statistics tangible through the imagining of…
Poor ordering and delivery process with no tracking capability, the book is very poorly printed with some pages so lightly printed it’s not possible to read them. As for the content, I’m finding it somewhat tedious. While the attempt to make the appalling statistics tangible through the imagining of 7 representative children is laudable, the execution is clumsy so that one is constantly reminded one is not reading about real children. There are frequent tangents on comparative statistics that are not solidly on point for the child being discussed. The parents of these children all appear to be serious, well-meaning, competent parents, which is nice, but perhaps not fully representative of how difficult parenting in poverty really is. So far I have become bogged down in the 2nd child of the bottom quintile, but I plan to crack on and hope it will become less tiresome.
- Authors:
- Dorling, Danny
- Format:
- Paperback
- ISBN:
- 9781911723509
- Publication Date:
- 26/09/2024
- Publisher:
- C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
- Year Published:
- 2024
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Number of Pages:
- 320
- Place of Publication:
- London
- Language:
- English
- SKU:
- 9781911723509