Collaboration over domestic work (for girls) or maintaining the home (for boys) is a vehicle through which parents ascribe value to adolescents, model appropriate behaviour and include them in social reproduction in ways that are consistent with the aspirations of parenting captured in the WHO's five dimensions. Adolescents are proud of their participation in the running of the family and prioritise their "right to help in the home" as well as engage in family activities (Bray, 2012,Thorpe, 2005). For reasons we go on to explain, the pressures and motivations around work influence the notion of 'good parenting' in this region, differing from those commonly expected or assessed using standard measures. Poverty plus additional vulnerability due to HIV, including orphanhood and family dispersal, lies behind adolescent engagement in commercial sex work (Nyambedha, 2007), while transactional sex in the community is commonplace across poor neighbourhoods (Juma et al., 2013).Young people's reliance on these informal and often exploitative relationships increases where lone mothers, or small families, cannot meet material needs or connect adolescents to genuine alternative routes towards upward social mobility (Ngugi et al.,