Danny Dorling Seven Children Q&A parents #Short

Q. What do you think parents like the ones in this book are feeling right now?

In his new book, author and University of Oxford geographer Danny Dorling has written about a group of typical five-year-olds and their families with the aim of showing the human stories behind the wealth data about growing poverty and inequality in the UK. Seven Children: Inequality and Britain's Next Generation (Hurst) is out on 26 September.

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It's very hard to put yourself in other people’s shoes whose lives are very different to your. Okay, I can put myself in the shoes of a well-paid Guardian columnist, and I can put myself in the shoes of university academics, almost all of whom, compared to the families that this book is about, are well paid, although they very often tell me that they're not.

But I find it hard to put myself in the shoes of somebody who is struggling as much as you will struggle on that, reading a description of what's going on. But my only experience, mainly with people a bit younger than me, who did grow up in poverty, is anger – they’re just angry about what happened once they know that it wasn't inevitable, once they know that this was a choice that other people were making. They’re very angry about what has happened to them and to their family.