Just as a seed planted in barren soil, in deep shade, and in the path of an unforgiving wind struggles to flourish, so, too, do many children begin life with the odds stacked heavily against them. Action for Children, one of the three charities chosen by The Times for this year's Christmas Appeal, strives to tilt the balance back in these children's favour.

Overcoming odds is not impossible. But the challenge is daunting, and the costs of repairing young lives fractured by the trauma of growing up parentless and rootless are steep. All too often these are children who have spent their childhoods ricocheting around the care system. They are children who are too easily branded by society as feral, when they are more often just frightened and friendless.

Children brought up in care often find themselves, as adults, living in the chillier margins of life. They are five times more likely to have mental health problems. A third of young offenders, and a quarter of adult prisoners, have been in care. So, too, have a third of homeless people.

Action for Children mines the potential in the 170,000 young people that it reaches through its 450 projects. It provides community centres. It helps disabled children and their families. It locates adoptive parents and foster carers. After helping children and young people in care, it later helps them to negotiate what can seem a baffling and lonely world once they have left care, lending an ear on problems, offering advice on how to overcome them, and introducing them to opportunities they might not have imagined to be within their grasp. Action for Children is changing lives. It deserves your generosity.