A young boy who spends his time in an abandoned house fears for his own future happiness after he watches his father live a difficult life.

A 5-year-old boy with a unique way of seeing the world feels alienated from his mother and tells her that he does not need her anymore. This viewpoint later causes him to lash out at his family, leading him to reflect on himself and his life.

As she begins to feel that her boyfriend is trying to create reasons for her to leave him, a woman tries to understand his difficult past as a child in the American foster care system.

After her mother’s death, an imaginative 9-year-old girl bullied by kids at school and by her father, who has a new girlfriend, at home finds comfort only in her dog.

A four-year-old boy who lives in Denmark is abandoned by his mother and sent to live with his aunt and very sick uncle, where he must endure the loss of yet another parental figure.

After a dying mother instructs her children to find their distant aunt and new guardian, they must step outside the home they have always known and embark on a journey toward their new life.

After a ten-year-old boy joins his parents in bidding his grandfather farewell as he leaves New York for Germany, he experiences the first major loss of his youth and struggles to understand the complexity of the experience.

Though numerous social workers try to step in, a co-dependent mother and son bounce from city to city, in search of a place where they can be together at all times.

A teacher in Washington tries to comfort one of his students—an orphan who is dying from a chronic disease—opting to be her guardian for the summer even in the face of her looming, imminent death.

Two brothers are left under the unreliable care of their alcoholic uncle when their parents leave town.