I am, however, human. I was momentarily intrigued last week when 6-year-old Colorado resident Falcon Heene was thought to have been floating around in the wide blue yonder. Sure, this story held its own as a news feature—it had shock value, a ubiquitously eccentric family, and the potential for a happy ending (or, conversely, a sad one—the American public doesn’t really seem to discriminate as long as the bad news is arbitrary, quirky, and far, far away), but once the mystery was solved, the story should have been reduced to nothing. A six-year-old boy was found to be hiding in his attic for several hours. As far as scandals go, I would rate this as fairly weak. And yet coverage continued long after Falcon was found to be safe and sound.

The majority of homeless children are suffering exponentially more at only a fraction of the volume. In her October 19th column, Arianna Huffington put it nicely: “I find the media’s obsession with these stories especially galling when they lead to endless agonizing over the welfare of a child—agonizing that is sorely missed when there isn’t a hot air balloon or an inner tube in shark-infested waters involved.”

By media standards, homeless children and youth fly under the radar. Their stories rarely include “storm chasers” or mischievous kids lurking in attics, but just because their problems are relatively common is no reason to disregard them.

So allow me to highlight, briefly, the plight of these kids. For most homeless children, hardship isn’t defined as a few-hour stint hiding in the attic. Hardship isn’t a one-time fluke “accident” while playing in the backyard. It’s a way of life. It’s constant hunger or inadequate care or worrying about where they’ll sleep at night. It’s a lack of affordable housing and quality healthcare. It’s intolerant school districts or incarcerated parents or assuming parental responsibility for younger siblings at 15. It’s a series of different barriers that pose numerous problems for 50-year-olds, let alone 5th graders.  

Families forced from their homes because of eviction or foreclosure, children born into shelters, youth struggling in school because of high mobility—each one of these stories should elicit a response equal to those witnessed during the hunt for the Balloon Boy. (See? You can’t even reference it without sounding ridiculous.) These stories are exponentially more devastating. The only thing they’re missing is the sensation factor, the text of minute-by-minute updates running on a loop at the bottom of a screen. Homeless children tend to suffer quietly, and it is our responsibility to reach out to them.

There is no single face of homelessness, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the 60,000+ very different faces of homeless school-age children in Illinois. These kids, though their stories may not be as sensational or eccentric, need our attention far more than Balloon Boy.

Full text of the column can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/how-about-a-little-covera_b_326472.html
 
- Claire Lombardo, Intern of the CCH Law Project