"We need to come back here tomorrow. And the next day. And the next."

My five-year-old son hurled himself onto his twin-sized cot, smiling as the springs creaked under the weight of his 55-pound body.

“This has been the best night ever,” he said, recalling highlights of our evening, spent visiting with two homeless families staying the week at our church as part of a program that provides short-term shelter to families who are homeless. “I had so much fun playing with everyone.”

I tussled his brown hair and told him how proud I was of him. “You were great out there, Buddy. So patient and kind. And you really helped everyone to have a lot of fun. You should be happy to know you made them smile. We’ll have more fun with everyone in the morning.”

He looked at me, his brown-green eyes wide.

“But Mommy? I thought you said there were going to be some homeless kids here. There weren’t even any homeless kids here. Just my new friends, Matthew and Rob and Katie.” (Names have been changed for the purpose of anonymity.)

My son’s comment was unexpected, since, of course, the children we’d spent the evening enjoying were, indeed, homeless.

“Why do you say they weren’t homeless, Buddy?”

“Because they are just like me. Just kids -- kids who want to have fun and laugh and go to school and play soccer. They weren’t any different at all.”

My son’s understanding – although simplistic – hints at what many of us believe, deep down, about the homeless.

There is this sense that, perhaps, homeless people are starkly different from us. We tend to envision them as mentally ill. Or anti-social. Or perhaps just so eclectic that they prefer to spend their days bouncing from place to place, taking the handouts they can get along the way.

Dehumanizing people who go through life without basic necessities like housing, clothing and food, makes it easier for us to accept, somehow.

Of course, the real face of homelessness is the very people that we had spent the evening with - often women and their children or couples with children.

Last month, the Census Bureau released data showing that poverty in the U.S. is at an all-time high, with more Americans living in poverty than during any of the 51 years in which poverty has been measured. We also know that more than one in five American children live in poverty and one in three African-American children live below the poverty line.

It stands to reason that many of these families have been or will be homeless at some point because of their precarious financial situations.

Once my young son understood that his new friends were like him – but also without homes – his smile turned to grim determination.

“We need to come back here tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. And the next. And we need to do something.”

What, exactly, we need to do is a complex question. But understanding homeless children and families – viewing them the same way we view ourselves and our friends – is surely an important start.