In the Introduction, I outlined why this book does not have the restrictive aim of proposing policy recommendations. I argued, among other points, that if one's goal in writing about street children is to offer ideas on how to eradicate a problem, one can hardly view those people seen to embody the problem as autonomous beings in a social world. Reduced to something to be cured, street children become objects in a distant debate among adults. This book has aimed to treat street children as socially significant protagonists while also bringing into focus the adult debates in which they are enmeshed. Yet, while I believe it base, even harmful, to reduce street children to a problem, the lives of children growing up in the streets of Recife and other Brazilian cities are fraught with problems. A danger is therefore implicit in refusing to think in terms of change. Feigning the role of the detached observer in the face of an intolerable status quo is to accept tacitly that same status quo or, worse, to hide behind the cynical vogue of treating the brutality of social life as so much text. This final chapter employs the main themes of the ethnography – identity, violence, the relationship of street children to institutions, and the idea of childhood itself – to reassess the problem-ridden worlds of street children and considers the question of the future, that is, of what may lie ahead for street children.