Children of the 21st Century: The First Five Years Hansen Kirstine, Joshi Heather and Dex Shirley ( eds ) Bristol : Policy Press , 2010 ISBN 9781847424754 , 298 pp, £24.99 (pb ) Written by a number of leading social scientists and health experts, Children of the 21st Century offers a detailed look at the first five years of life of almost 19 000 children born at the turn of the century in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who have participated in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). The edited volume covers 14 different aspects of children’s development, each capitalising on the longitudinal nature of the data by examining change over time in children’s outcomes and/or the contexts they develop in. Key outcomes for children assessed in the study include children’s cognitive ability, behaviour and physical health. Several chapters provide detailed coverage of children who are growing up in poverty including Chapter 2 (Bradshaw and Holmes), which explores trends in poverty over children’s first five years. Chapters 12 (Hansen) and 14 (Schoon, Cheng and Jones) examine the degree to which families’ economic resources influence children’s development over time, highlighting some potential protective factors that mitigate the deleterious influence of poverty on children’s development. Chapter 9 (Blanden and Machin) offers an exploratory look at the degree to which the link between parents’ income and changes in children’s outcomes over time has varied between children in the MCS and previous cohort studies of children. Other chapters examine the role of ethnicity and culture in children’s development, such as Chapter 3 (Sullivan), which focuses on the intersection of ethnicity and social capital in the neighbourhoods children are raised in, and Chapter 10 (Dearden and Sibieta), which highlights ethnic differences in children’s outcomes. Influences of family structure, parenting and employment on children’s development are the focus of several chapters including Chapters 4 (Jones) and 5 (Kiernan and Mensah), which examine how parents’ relationship quality and variations in family structure affect children’s development. Chapters 13 (Griffiths and others) and 15 (Kelly and Bartley) explore the degree to which parental health and health-related behaviours link to their children’s health including childhood obesity. Chapter 6 (Dex and Ward) takes the reader into the working lives of these young children’s families and examines parents’ employment trajectories over the first five years of children’s lives. Finally, several chapters explore the variation in some key contexts of children’s development, such as neighbourhoods, early years’ settings and schools. Chapter 7 (Ketende, McDonald and Joshi) explores children’s residential mobility, aiming to understand how area deprivation and perceptions of neighbourhoods are related to families’ mobility patterns. Chapter 8 (Roberts and others) offers a detailed examination of childcare usage including a sub-study of childcare quality in 300 settings. Chapter 11 (Hansen and Vignoles) takes advantage of legislation mandating school choice to examine the degree to which families are exercising this choice. Given the timing of the study, the findings shed some light on how children and their families are faring in a time when government has made a commitment to eradicate child poverty, increased spending on early years’ services for young children and expanded parental leave, among other policies. The findings from the data also offer the possibility of comparisons with data from previous cohort studies to understand what may be distinct about growing up today. The volume provides a comprehensive compendium of young children’s development in the UK today, which is useful for fellow social scientists and researchers as well as students and professionals interested in understanding child development.