This article tends the concept of family neglect, based on reports of five year old children, during a research carried out in a school of the municipal network for child education in a city in the Metropolitan Region of Porto Alegre/RS. The central objective of the research sought to understand how children understood and interpreted the violence of people experienced in the family and/or their surroundings. Based on theorisations proposed by the Sociology of Children, strategies have been used to promote this debate with children through chat wheels and literary readings. The results have pointed to what we call survival modes as a strategy that unattended families are pushed to put in place to establish the safety of children in the domestic environment.