Honouring both hardship and joy: reflecting on research into children's experiences in transitional housing


Rebecca Raby, Brock University; Luiza Mattos Jobim da Costa, Brock University

Homeless children and their families face many challenges, including precarity and stigma (Gaetz et al., 2021). These adversities and prejudices are particularly pronounced for those who are part of an already marginalized community (Blackstock et al. 2011; Gulliver-Garcia, 2016). Little scholarship examines the experiences of homeless children in Canada (Huot and Covell, 2019; Wiese and Brown, 2018), including those living in transitional housing. Our paper investigates the resonances and disconnections we have perceived between the harm and risk-based representations and experiences of homeless children, and positive observations from staff and in our participant-observation sessions. Significant scholarship has addressed children’s resilience in the face of adversity (Hart et al, 2016). However, a focus on resilience has also been criticized for individualizing responsibility and distracting from a focus on the unequal, structural contributors to adversity in children’s lives (Hart et al, 2016). Our interdisciplinary project follows such concerns to focus on contextual resilience (Ungar, 2004) within a social justice approach (Fairchild et al., 2017) that attends to children’s multidimensional lives within unequal structural contexts in need of change. We draw on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with seven staff members, alongside interactive, long-term participant-observation research with eleven children in temporary, after-school programming. In addition to recognizing that the children face a range of challenges, staff members raised their own and parents’ concerns about how to protect the from exposure to disturbing situations in transitional housing, including seeing drug paraphernalia and the presence of the police. Stigma surrounding homelessness (Fairchild et al., 2017) also led some of us, as researchers, to feel nervousness when beginning to conduct this research, a feeling that extended to our conversations with others about the research. Such stigma can divide groups of people and lead to presumptions about others’ capacities (Fairchild et al., 2017). Yet, as we engage in participant observation, stigma and related concerns about the children living in transitional housing often feel out of sync with more positive staff comments about the children’s interactions and our own observational note-taking about the rich, joyful, child-initiated activities that fill many of the after-school sessions. These findings underscore Fairchild et al.s (2017) arguments for a balanced representation of children that considers their strengths and capacities, not just their challenges and potential deficits. Additionally, we have been struck by the participants’ open and friendly interactions with staff and others that live within the facility, illustrating their emotional, social, and collaborative strengths, despite their challenging circumstances and awareness of potential dangers. Our paper explores these discrepancies between significant challenges in our participants’ lives and our day-to-day interactions with them by focusing on 1) how dangers were and are discussed by staff and children in the research space; 2) the concept of childhood innocence, how it is deployed in conversations about homeless children, and how it has shaped, informed, and complicated our research experiences; 3) how we are learning about and experiencing a breadth of engagements with the children, between the children, and between the children and others in the building, including many positive, fun, joyful, and often quite mundane interactions; 4) how we have thought about these interactions in terms of children’s relationality, resiliency, agency, coping, and playfulness; and 5): the importance of thinking about hardship and resiliency through a social justice lens. We observe that the participants recognize and are affected by the dangers the adults are concerned about, but that they are not consumed or singularly defined by them.

Non-presenting authors: Christine Tardif-Williams, Brock University; Erika Alegria, Brock University

This paper will be presented at the following session: