The main objective of this chapter is to examine the role that formal education plays in perceptions of their own well-being among a group of young Peruvians who live in a precarious economic situation, and how this relates to their expectations.

The analysis in this chapter explores the relationships between cognitive skill development, schooling, and patterns of advantage and disadvantage at the child and household levels over time. It examines ?skills gaps? across a number of key axes of advantage and disadvantage, both within and between countries, and explores how these develop over the child?s early life course.

This chapter is about restrictions on the agency of young people, and especially of girls, in the context of poverty[u1] . It reports on survey and qualitative data from the Young Lives study inVietnam andAndhra Pradesh,India (see www.younglives.org.uk). The aim is to deepen understanding of girls? and boys?

Using mixed methods the chapter examines the experiences of children aged 8 and their families from Ethiopia and Vietnam. The chapter first reviews a wide range of shocks, their level of incidence, perceived importance to the households, recurrence, and covariance. The chapter then examines ex-ante risk-management strategies and ex-post coping strategies adopted by households and how children's roles and responsibilities change as a result.

In the context of developing countries, there have been few recent empirical studies investigating parental background correlates of children?s cognitive skills, and even fewer studies looking at the background factors associated with children?s psychosocial skills. These studies have considered the roles played by parental socio-economic status (SES), as measured by income or education, in shaping a child?s cognitive and psychosocial skills and the extent to which a mother?s cognitive and psychosocial skills predict the same skills in her child.

The first part of this volume highlights four important trends that have affected children in the study countries since Young Lives began ? trends that also apply to many other countries in the developing world. First, amid the economic growth of all countries in the study, there have been striking changes at the community level, as well as striking differences between communities, that have significant outcomes for the children. Second, factors in home background remain key to acquiring competencies and skills, affecting even what children learn at school.

The chapter looks at children?s trajectories from early childhood through to the time they leave school, examining when and why they leave school, the types of schools they go to (government or private), and how various factors are shaping their educational opportunities and achievement. It synthesizes existing Young Lives analysis based on three rounds of research with two age cohorts.

Young Lives has been introduced as a longitudinal study that follows two cohorts of children in poor communities in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam as they grow into young adults. In this chapter, after pointing to the importance of longitudinal studies in the social sciences, we use the experience of designing and implementing Young Lives to reflect on some issues surrounding the process of such studies, and on the use of their findings to inform policy.

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In the past few decades, education in Peruhas shown increased enrolment, especially in primary schools, but low achievement as measured by national and international standard tests in reading comprehension and mathematics. However, averages hide wide disparities in educational outcomes, which are often influenced by individual and family characteristics. Among these, coming from a family that speaks an indigenous language has been shown to be a significant predictor of low educational outcomes as compared to coming from a Spanish-speaking family.