This article tends towards the concept of family neglect, starting from reports of five year old children, during a search carried out in a school of the municipal network of child education in a town of the Metropolitan Region of Porto Alegre/RS. The central objective of the research is to understand how children perceive and interpret gênery violence experienced in the family and/or in their enclosure. From the theorisation proposed by the Children’s Sociology, strategies have been used to promote this debate with children through chat wheels and literary readings. The results pointed to what we call survival modes as a strategy for unassisted families to be put in place to establish child safety in the domestic environment.