Honouring Hardship and Fun: Reflecting on Homeless Children's Experiences in Shelter

ABSTRACT In our research with children living in a homeless shelter with their families in Southern Ontario, Canada, we navigated discrepancies between the challenges and hardships in our participants' lives and the fun, positive nature of many of our day‐to‐day interactions with them. This empirically based, reflexive paper draws on interactive participant observations with 24 children, as well as interviews with shelter staff, to explore how, as researchers, we can and should think about these divergent aspects of our research in ways that are thoughtful and affirming. We discuss hardships in the children's lives, the joyfulness and community‐building of many of our everyday research interactions, and how childhood innocence and children's resilience are sometimes deployed in thinking about children in difficult situations. We draw on a strength‐based approach to think about positive engagements and children's capacities without dismissing or trivialising their hardships. A strength‐based approach recognises capacities and supportive interrelationships alongside structural inequalities. We aim to maintain a complex picture of our research, illustrating the urgency of addressing children's homelessness alongside recognising our child participants' capacities and spiritedness in the face of hardship.