the position that the making of meaning, or what Bruner ( 1990) recently
referred to as "world making," is a "principal function of the mind."
Adults and children are continually about the business of constructing
their world, sorting it out, and making sense out of all the pieces in their
lives. In constructing their life stories, they are "authors," as Bakhtin
would have it ( Bruner, 1990).

Telling one's story is in a real sense "making one's life." It is through
stories that those who listen come to know how others have made
meaning, what their world looks like from their point of view. Stories
are a clear and simple way for one to see as the other sees. Through the
stories of homelessness told here, it is hoped that helping professionals
can come to understand the world of homeless children, and ultimately,
through understanding their world, support and enable them on their
journey to adulthood.

To what can the recent rise in homelessness among families be attrib-
uted? It is clear that the fundamental causes are poverty and a severe
shortage of affordable housing. Homeless families, whether on welfare or
working for the minimum wage, spend an excessive proportion of their
income for housing. In addition, the number of low-income housing units
is decreasing annually. In the context of insufficient money and housing,
poor families in the United States today are confronted by numerous other
problems: under- and unemployment, social disaffiliation, family and
street violence, substance abuse, cutbacks in the availability of social
services, and the decline of the traditional nuclear family. It is against the
backdrop of some or many of these problems that poor families struggle,
not only to maintain themselves physically, but also to survive psycholog-
ically, as families. In spite of their efforts, some families eventually fall
through the not-so-safe "safety nets" and become homeless.

Regardless of the varied causes of the general phenomenon of
homelessness, individual homeless families differ significantly from one
another in terms of how homelessness happened to them. Homelessness
is a term that includes a wide variety of people and circumstances. On
the surface, what this diverse population of people share is the lack of a
roof over their heads, but the crisis of finding oneself without a home
can take several different forms. In their research comparing homeless
families with housed public assistance families in New York, Weitzman,
Knickman, and Shinn ( 1990) distinguished three common pathways into
homelessness.

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