Teens’ Fragile Lives Laid Bare: Homelessness, Grief and Gun Violence

This story is part of our Barriers Before the Bell special report. The 74's Jessika Harkay reached out to more than 100 students across the country to understand the obstacles children face before they head into class each morning.

For millions of American students, the hardest part of the school day happens before the first bell rings.

For these young people, it isn’t as easy as getting on a bus, going to class, coming home and doing homework: They face hardships that affect how they view and participate in education — whether it’s navigating financial, food or housing instability, dealing with a chronic illness or grief or living in fear of immigration enforcement or in the aftermath of gun violence.

It’s young people like Ky, who is still haunted by the loss of two of her best friends in a school shooting several years ago. It’s young people like Brook, who experienced homelessness several times in high school after her mother died. And it’s young people like Jessica, who felt like she had to balance work and high school to help pay the bills at home.

“Everything that they’re going through impacts the lives that they lead, impacts the education that they seek and impacts their ability to show up fully as themselves,” said Brittany Packnett Cunningham, vice president of the Children’s Defense Fund.

“Dignity, hope and joy,” she continued, “[are] three things foundational to a child’s well-being in and out of school.” 

For the Barriers Before the Bell series, The 74 reached out to more than 100 students who posted about their experiences on TikTok. Over the course of 12 months, The 74 interviewed more than a dozen of these students, all from different regions of the country, about what it was like balancing classes and schoolwork while navigating fragile life circumstances like homelessness, family illness, school gun violence and helping to pay the bills.

For some students, school provided consistency and an escape from instability at home. For others, going to class was viewed as another responsibility, one that became their last priority. 

“Dignity, hope and joy [are] three things foundational to a child’s well-being in and out of school.”

– Brittany Packnett Cunningham

Some students in this series were able to persevere and graduate with honors. But for others, school had to be put on hold so they could focus on caring for family members or their mental health. Some credited family, friends or educators as support systems, but many also said they felt isolated. 

Despite their ages, circumstances or location, the young people in this series share a common thread and represent hundreds, or possibly thousands, of young people in America sharing their experiences, making their voices heard or finding people who can relate to them through social media.

“It used to be that you wanted to keep [your hardships] under lock and key, but that’s not this generation,” said Linda Charmaraman, director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. “This generation in some ways is like ‘If nobody knows about it, it almost doesn’t even exist.’”

The 74 sourced this series of stories through TikTok videos, combined with several interviews with the students throughout the year.

While much of the conversation around social media in recent years has centered on its harms and enforcing limitations, experts argue it can also be a helpful tool, especially for marginalized youth who “can’t find their community in real life, in their geographic region or even in their household.”

“Social media [has become] a free resource for everybody. It’s an equalizing way of finding your community that doesn’t cost a lot of money,” Charmaraman said.

The 10 young people highlighted in this series offer just a glimpse of what it’s like to be a student in the United States today and what they want adults to see and understand.

“[Students] have taken to TikTok, they’ve taken to Instagram, they’ve taken to Snapchat and Threads and all of these places to tell us what we need to know,” Cunningham said. “All we have to do is actually listen.”

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