In what has been an unprecedented time in the UK for family policy initiatives and developments, it has been useful, and perhaps not entirely coincidental, that a new large-scale longitudinal survey of babies was launched. In starting the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) of 18,819 babies, we were following in well-worn footsteps of earlier generations, this being the fourth nation-wide birth cohort study launched in the UK. However, in other ways, new pathways were being charted in this survey that were very clearly in tune with and driven by millennium policy issues on families and children. This volume has given us the chance to start to dip into the richness of this new survey, explore its potential, compare with earlier generations and provide some benchmarks for the future with this new generation of children who have started out life in this era of new UK family policy.

The policy context into which this new birth cohort arrived had many dimensions. Clearly, there was and is concern about the sizeable numbers of children growing up in poverty. Concern has grown alongside mounting evidence, not least from the earlier birth cohorts, that this leads to poorer outcomes for these children when they become adults. The devolved UK administrations, with their potential to have differing health and education policies, are another strong policy interest. It is important to know whether children's and families’ experiences will start to diverge more within the UK than in the past. The role of fathers has become a concern in this era of increasing lone-parent families and reductions in men's labour force participation rates. Minority ethnic communities are a growing component of the UK population partly because some have higher fertility rates, and yet, in many cases, live in disadvantaged conditions and areas. In this era of concern about equality of opportunity, how are minority ethnic children faring? Finally, in an era of low fertility and increasing childlessness, looking after this generation of children becomes a more pressing societal issue. We will be relying on these Millennium children more in the future, given the demographics of ageing, to look after us all over our increasing life spans. These are some of the main broad policy concerns of the new millennium which helped to persuade the Economic and Social Research Council and governments to initiate and fund this new large-scale study.