There is abundant evidence that children in low income households do less well than their peers on a range of developmental outcomes. However, there is continuing uncertainty about how far money itself matters, and how far associations simply reflect other, unobserved, differences between richer and poorer families. The authors conducted a systematic review of studies using methods that lend themselves to causal interpretation. To be included, studies had to use Randomised Controlled Trials, quasi-experiments or fixed effect-style techniques on longitudinal data. The results lend strong support to the hypothesis that household income has a positive causal effect on children’s outcomes, including their cognitive and social-behavioural development and their health, particularly in households with low income to begin with. There is also clear evidence of a positive causal effect of income on ‘intermediate outcomes’ that are important for children’s development, including maternal mental health, parenting and the home environment. The review also makes a methodological contribution, identifying that effects tend to be larger in experimental and quasi-experimental studies than in fixed effect approaches. This finding has implications for our ability to generalise from observational studies.

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Low-income parents have long been demonised in both political discourses and mainstream media, portrayed as lacking in parenting skills not just financial resources. Using the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) this article examines to what extent there are differences in the parenting of low-income mothers by examining parenting behaviours of low-, middle- and high-income mothers. The findings show that where there are negative differences in the parenting of low-income mothers these are often part of a broader income gradient that extends all the way up the distribution, rather than unique to low-income mothers. Furthermore, there are some positive differences in parenting among low-income mothers compared to middle-income mothers. These findings have important implications: low-income parents are not an unusual or deviant group parenting differently to everyone else. The findings suggest more attention ought to be given to parenting differences higher up the income distribution. In focusing on low-income parents only, existing evidence exaggerates differences and wrongly identifies low-income parents as problematic.

The official measure of violent crime, reported by the Office for National Statistics using the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), excludes sexual offences and neglects the self-completion survey data which more reliably captures sexual and domestic violence. In failing to include these gendered forms of violence, the official picture of who is most at risk of violence is skewed, suggesting men are at greater risk than women. This research re-estimates who is most at risk of violence, incorporating sexual and domestic violence and analysing trends in violence between 2005 and 2018 by gender. The findings challenge official statistics, revealing that women were at greater risk of violence than men in 2018.