Home violence is one of the reasons most frequently mentioned by street children to justify home abandonment. The present research aims to investigate how children under this condition perceive their families. Fifty children from two groups were interviewed: twenty-seven were in the institutions and twenty-three in the streets. Although the perceptions of the two groups of children were different, the results showed that most of them expressed affection and acceptance shifted with maltreatment and rejection toward their families. Therefore, the results suggest that these children along the developmental process construct different meanings of family. There are clear evidences of the oscillation in their conceptions of a thought family - idealized, referential, setting of social norms - and a lived family - the one that comes up in everyday life, mainly in the case of children who live in the institutions.
Family; Street children; Development
