Hoffman argues that international child protection work in Haiti, and the family reunification drive that expanded after the 2010 earthquake, rest on assumptions about childhood and household that do not describe the country. Registries built to return separated children to their birth parents ran into a result that should have been expected: a large share of the children on them had left home long before the quake.

Movement between households is ordinary in Haiti. She assembles survey evidence that only about a third of children live with both biological parents, that most young people have left the household they were born into and many have done so repeatedly, and that these moves track work, schooling, the breakup of unions and death. Restavèk children sit inside this pattern rather than outside it. Drawing on the anthropology of childhood, Hoffman resists both the sensational image of slavery and blanket verdicts on children's labour, noting how unstable the status itself is.