The UN General Comment 21 on Children in Street Situations (CSS) recalls the rights that are particularly crucial for this population and guides upon the measures and proceedings that should be reinforced in order to guarantee access to these rights. It therefore evokes some of the factors that favor or impede the translation of the formal liberties contained in the Convention on the Rights of the Child into real freedoms. Observations and interviews in residential care and youth service centers in some of the largest cities of Brazil highlight further discriminations that are mostly invisible. The latter are linked to the institutional order which superimposes its own rationality to the rights-based approach: the composition of the population in these centers reveals that not only CSS but a larger population of children is cared for in terms that actually cannot fully stem from the General Comment 21 on Children in Street Situations. Hidden frameworks are naturalized in daily interactions within the centers and between the centers and the administrative and political authorities. The translation of social processes into an administrative logic that is eventually what counts as good governance is made through “transactional horizons” centered on an entrepreneurial mode of action.