“If I Don’t Help Them, Who Will?”

This chapter provides the readers with a clear sense of what is physically involved in this line of work for children and parents. The chapter describes what children do on a typical day, what kinds of jobs children do, how old they are when they start working, and how these different tasks are initiated. The chapter identifies three different work patterns for working children: (1) vacation work, (2) weekends only, and (3) school nights and weekends. Some children of street vendors also opt out of street vending altogether. In this chapter, we see the fluidity of their intersectional childhood, as they are nurtured by their parents and also nurture their parents. Children's voices and desires for material goods, combined with the structural circumstances that push the families to street vend, inform the ongoing sociological debate about structure and agency through the children's perspective.