Sarah Ruscoe still remembers lying awake at night worrying about her daughter’s bed. The frame was broken, and with no money to replace it, she had propped it up on books just to keep it level enough to sleep in. Every creak in the night made her stomach drop.
“I was terrified it would just collapse while she was sleeping,” Sarah said. “No parent should have to feel like that.”
Sarah is a single mum from Wales who has been out of work due to ongoing health problems. Like thousands of families across the country, she has found herself caught in a gap where the bills keep coming but the money simply does not stretch far enough. Basic things that most people take for granted, a safe bed, a warm room, a full fridge, have become daily battles.
Her story is not unique. Across Wales, child poverty is quietly tightening its grip on families in towns and communities that have already been through decades of economic hardship. The latest figures paint a grim picture, with a significant proportion of children in Wales growing up in households that cannot reliably cover the basics.
For Sarah, the stress of managing on a limited income while dealing with her own health issues has been relentless. She has had to make the kind of choices that no parent wants to make, whether to eat properly herself so her daughter can, which bills to pay first, and how to explain to a child why certain things are just not possible right now.
The broken bed became a symbol of all of it. It sat there in her daughter’s room as a daily reminder of how close to the edge they were living. Sarah patched it up as best she could, using whatever she had around the house, but she knew it was not a real solution.
Child poverty campaigners in Wales have been raising the alarm for years, arguing that the current system of support is not keeping up with the reality families like Sarah’s are facing. The cost of living crisis that hit hard over the past couple of years made things significantly worse, pushing families who were just about managing into genuine hardship.
Welsh Government has introduced various measures aimed at tackling child poverty, including the expansion of free school meals and targeted financial support schemes. But charities working on the ground say the gap between policy announcements and what families are actually experiencing remains wide.
For many parents, the issue is not just about money in isolation. It is about the knock-on effects. Children growing up in poverty are more likely to struggle at school, more likely to experience mental health difficulties, and more likely to face barriers that follow them well into adulthood. The bed propped up on books is one small part of a much bigger picture.
Sarah has since managed to get a replacement bed through a local charity that helps families in need with household essentials. It sounds like a small thing, but she described the relief as enormous.
“My daughter just wanted a normal bed,” she said. “Every kid deserves that much.”
She is now trying to get back into work when her health allows, but the journey is complicated. Childcare costs, transport, and the risk of losing certain benefits while she gets back on her feet all create a web of obstacles that can make moving forward feel almost impossible.
Her situation highlights what many campaigners describe as the poverty trap, a set of circumstances where the system itself can make it harder to improve your position, even when you are trying your hardest to do so.
With the Welsh Government under pressure to do more and Westminster welfare reforms continuing to cause anxiety among low-income households, families like Sarah’s are watching closely to see whether the promises made in Cardiff Bay will translate into real change at kitchen table level.
For now, Sarah is focused on her daughter, making sure she has what she needs and trying to shield her from the worst of the financial stress. But she wants people to know what life actually looks like for families living in poverty in Wales today.
“It is not just statistics,” she said. “It is kids sleeping on beds propped up on books. It is real.”