Across the UK, there are 4.3 million children now living in poverty, and parents are worried sick trying to figure out how they’re going to give their kids what they need to set them up well for the years ahead.

A new survey from Unicef UK found that 87% of parents to babies, toddlers and children under five are anxious about their children’s future life chances. Unsurprisingly, given the stress they’re under, 66% of parents said they’re struggling with their mental health.

“Our findings show that families across the country are really struggling,” says Joanna Rea of Unicef UK. “Behind these numbers are real parents skipping meals and worrying about making ends meet and children going without the essentials they need, starting school already behind their peers, and growing up in stressed and stretched households with parents struggling every day.”

Teesha Thomas is a 36-year-old single mum to children aged one, 10 and 11. Working part-time as an associate nurse in London, she is just about making ends meet for her family between her salary and Universal Credit payments.

“I’m burnt out,” Teesha tells Stylist, “and I’ve lost a lot of weight. The end of the month is tightest for us. The children need to eat, but it might mean that I might go without a meal. Sometimes I’m too stressed to eat.”

Her part-time salary just covers the £962 monthly bill for three days of childcare and Universal Credit has to pay for the rest of the family’s necessities, including rent, clothing, food, gas and electricity. Childcare has been her “biggest challenge”; once she finally found a nursery to take her youngest, she had to pay a £500 deposit to make sure the space remained available, and now she has to pay the hefty monthly cost so that she can work. “I need the government to look at parents like me and offer more help to go back to work,” she tells Stylist.

In the Unicef survey, over six in 10 parents interviewed agreed with Teesha, saying childcare is one of the biggest challenges they face. For 66%, the cost-of-living crisis, including the cost of food, had negatively impacted their families. “It’s been harder to get good food on the table,” Teesha admits. When T-shirts get a bit tight or trousers too short, Teesha is “making the best of it”, knowing she can’t afford to buy the next size up. “I’ve found myself giving away my clothes to them,” she says, talking about her older children.

Prior to having her youngest son, Teesha was adding up all the baby things she needed to get – nappies, a buggy, a bed – and worrying about how she was going to pay for it. Luckily, she heard about Little Village, a baby bank near to where she lives, that provided her with a side cot, buggy, books, toys and clothes. “Before that, I hadn’t slept properly in weeks because I was worried about finances,” she says.

During the last year, baby banks supported at least 200,000 babies and children, according to new data from the Baby Bank Alliance, a 54.5% increase in referrals since 2021-2023.

“Families are left having to make impossible decisions between paying bills and buying food,” Hannah Pentith of Baby Bank Alliance tells Stylist. “Leaving little money in tight budgets left to buy key items for babies and children like cots, pushchairs, nappies and clothes.”

Pentith noted that in addition to Covid and the cost of living crisis as contributors to child poverty, so too is the government’s “unfair” decision in 2017 to enact the two-child benefit cap, preventing parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit for a third child. “With this policy, children are the ones who are punished and miss out – this is wrong,” she says. “Baby banks tell us that many families they support are impacted by the unfair two-child limit and scrapping it would lift 500,000 children out of poverty.”

Mothers – some of whom are working, caring for children with disabilities, fleeing domestic violence or raising children on their own – are coming to the baby banks desperate for help.

Rebecca Lambe, a mum of four children (aged seven, four, two and four months) who lives in Hartlepool, is managing to get by right now, but only by buying what her family needs to survive. “I’ll do anything for my kids,” the 29-year-old told Stylist. “If that means I go without, I’m happy to do that.” In recent months, she’s looked for nappies on giveaway sites, shopped in the reduced-stickered areas of the shop and spent hours looking for deals.

Having thought she wasn’t having any more children, Rebecca had given all of her baby items away. And then she found out she was pregnant with Nick, now four months old. “I was really worried,” she tells us, thinking back to how she felt when she wondered how she would afford another baby. “It massively played on my mental health. There were nights I’d just lay awake thinking about how I was going to do this.”

Like Teesha, Rebecca was able to access a baby bank and get items she needed, which was a massive weight off her mind. Even though baby banks are providing a community-focused solution to the immediate impact of poverty, Pentith says it “shouldn’t be this way” and the government should be stepping up. Not just for the wellbeing of mothers, but for children. “Poverty damages childhoods and impacts children’s life chances,” Alice Woudhuysen of the charity Action for Children, tells Stylist. “There’s plenty of evidence showing that children who’ve grown up on low incomes do worse at school, earn less as adults, suffer from poorer physical and mental health and are more likely to need help from a social worker.”

The knock-on effect will be felt throughout society, with one estimate from academics at Loughborough University putting the total cost of child poverty to the economy at £38 billion a year in spending on services like the NHS, benefits and social care, and reduced revenue from taxes.

Teesha accepts she chose to have children, an accusation often thrown at mothers who talk about the difficulties of paying for kids. “In us having children, we’re repopulating the country,” she said. “We’re soon going to be in a situation where [due to finances], people will stop having children. Who’s there then? Nobody.”

Woudhuysen is encouraged by the government’s commitment to developing a “bold” and “ambitious” child poverty strategy, and hopes the solutions they offer will include scrapping the two-child limit and investment in social security so that every family has enough to afford essentials. But she is also campaigning for the government to support parents to work – reforming the social security system so that entering work doesn’t leave parents worse off, improving access to affordable childcare, getting employers to play their part and supporting and empowering parents to find decent, secure jobs that work for them and their family’s needs. “The current trend cannot continue,” Woudhuysen concluded. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. Child poverty can be solved.”

Images: Getty