Analysis Of Almost Home: Helping Kids Move From Homelessness To Hope

Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope by Kevin Ryan and Tina Kelley is a book about children becoming homeless because of home neglect emotionally or physically. It explains the problems they went through to cause them to be homeless, like violence, prostitution, teen pregnancy, and abandonment, and how going to the Covenant House and their mentors at the house gradually helped them prosper in being stable with themselves and society. The author wrote the book to help readers understand how home life greatly affects the young people in the family. Children are influenced by their social control agents like parents and guardians, so the worse the adults treat the them in the household the more negative effects there will be …show more content…
Abuse, Drugs, Prostitution, Abandonment, and Neglect are majority of the reasons young people decided to become homeless. In the book, Benjamin and his siblings were abused emotionally and physically as a child by their parents. When being abused it makes the child feel like they are not worth anything and that they are unable to be loved, so living without a family is the better option. With moral crimes, like drugs and prostitution, it does not affect others, but it has a huge impact on the young person whom is participating in it. With drugs, it can people a high and make them feel better than they do when not on drugs; moreover, drugs are even a cry for help sometimes. Muriel did drugs to make herself feel happy and feel like she was worth something. When the cry for help is not being answered, young people feel they aren’t loved so they continue doing drugs until they get the help they deserve, run away, or even die. Prostitution makes an adolescent feel loved by their pimp and consumers even though they do not know what true love is to begin with because of their family. Muriel went into prostitution because a friend and pimp convinced her to, but she later realized that it had other factors like drugs and abuse. Many people are not able to get out and continue to live the same pain they lived when being at home. Abandonment is a big factor of homelessness; it can go from a parent leaving their child with someone else like a family member or adoptive family to just leaving them alone to defend for themselves. Paulie’s mother left him different people that she knew. When abandoned, a child feels unloved and unwanted so feel forced to leave. When being neglected, young people feel like they are not truly need whether it is they are getting no attention from other or it is just a huge family. Muriel was adopted into a huge family and she felt like she never