This work reports a research that attempted to identify modes of being a child produced by conceptions and practices which pervade a social work project aiming at attending youngsters at risk situation. The study was conducted in the form of institutional experience, including the quotidian social work life, visits to the social work children and adolescents' houses, informal interviews with the participants, with family members, and with social workers. The social work project, as a contemporary society mechanism, operates integrations over qualified substances (impoverished children and adolescents) and finalized functions (education, discipline, protection) to result in a visible content shape: the "social work kid", about whom it is possible to speak: the social risk discourse. The social work kid is a limit-shape between the street kid and the educated, well behaved child. The social work kid is a subjectivation process capture, since it holds them in a limit-shape that denounces a "dangerous nature".
social work; social risk situation; impoverished childhood