Reporting on the lives of children always presents a series of conundrums. How to talk to kids without their words being influenced by parents or adults around them? How to figure out how much is true of what they say? And the biggest dilemma, a moral one: How to tell the child's story without betraying his or her trust?

Egan helps support his family by selling gum at a checkpoint in the West Bank. Photo by Megan Williams.

When I met Ehab, the 11-year-old boy who sells gum in the West Bank town of Ramallah and at the nearby checkpoint, the first thing that struck me was his street-kid combo of toughness and vulnerability. He was proud of his independence and ability to make money. But he was also yearning to be just a kid. Despite his manly gesture of welcoming, it was the kid in him that insisted my translator and I come to his home to meet his family.

Ehab simply wanted a break, I soon realized, and inviting us back provided him one. But it also provided me with a fuller look into his life. I met his mother and his father's second wife. They graciously served me and my male translator tea, but were also anxious we wouldn't stay too long, lest their husband come home to find a strange man in the house. I saw Ehab shed his tough-guy exterior and play with his younger brother. And I learned about something awful that had happened to him. I heard about it from his mother, but I also witnessed Ehab react to her telling it, which revealed in a way no words could the impact the incident had on him.

The incident his mother told me about was too important a part of Ehab's life -- of the life of any child working on the street -- not to tell. But it also raised the old dilemma of reporting on children's lives: in exposing the painful realities of kids in poverty, we as reporters also run the risk of exposing more than a child might want to. As a reporter, and a mother, I hope the dilemma always leaves me feeling as uneasy as I did about telling Ehab's story.