Chores at home and working in the family business or farm are important ways to teach responsibility.
You want that computer game or a new movie dvd? Earn the money to buy it. Then ask yourself, is it really worth buying? Perhaps you may want to use the money in another way.
Every member of my family helped with housework, yard work, and cooking. I mowed five yards every summer to earn extra spending money. I started around age 13 by mowing a neighbor’s yard. Gradually added more as I got older.
Nothing too strenuous and certainly not anything dangerous.
After school paper routes and babysitting are one thing, or even helping out on the family farm/business. But to deprive children of a basic education when it could happen if the people in charge gave a damn is not good at all.
My ex started working when he was six, loading bricks in to wheelbarrows, then he was “adopted” and put to work as a houseboy in Cancun for a while, where he was beaten regularly and deprived of basic necessities. Then he was brought to the US at age 12 to work 16 hours a day on a tobacco farm and stayed there until he escaped at age 17. From there he went on to pick fruit for shamefully low pay. He never saw a day in a school. I mean sure he learned valuable lessons like how to be a laborer and suck it up when work conditions are deplorable. He didn’t get an education because the adults were lazy and greedy and saw him as a slave, not a human being.
To your OP and the way you framed it I would say yes it is bad and worse then bad. But the fault is not with them parents, but with those who exploit it.
It is a race to the bottom to get the meager scraps needed for living by great generational sacrifice. Once one submitted and offers their offspring, the bar has been lowered and if more do so so does the bar. more labor means lower wages (supply an demand). Lower wages (due to this) equates to lower ability to buy, so poverty increases though more people are working, thus the rich get richer (due to the ability to export, and other factors). So all in all yes very harmful as the lower class lowers it’s class in hopes of bettering the individual as the entire class sinks lower.
Is it bad for children to do any sort of work under any sort of circumstance? Of course not.
Is it difficult to create laws that allow ambitious young workoholics to freely choose to work a lot, while also stopping employers from taking advantage of kids for cheap labor? Yes.
Does the inertia of labor markets mean instantly banning child employment in economies where they are an integral part causes issues? Sure.
But “child labor” is rarely the ideal “work in the family trade” that the OP mentions, and as presented the OPs question is too vague to discuss further.
I understand your point, but the concept that it’s bad to beat the shit out of a children is also a modern invention. In the US, animals had rights before children did. We have to use some criteria other than ‘‘it’s only recently we’ve decided this is wrong.’’
The o.p. and others in this thread have made disingeneous arguments in equating “child labor” of the developing world sweatshop variety with chores, after school jobs, or even farm labor on the family homestead. Sweatshop labor is not some “8 am to 3 pm” substitute for school or day care, nor is it some kind of apprenticeship or lesson of the merits of the purported work ethic that people in developed nations often espouse from their 40-hour-a-week-and-twenty-days-of-vacation-a-year work lifestyle that is the result of labor protests against 19th century norms. The notion that childhood is a “modern invention” is false; in hunger gatherer societies (which typically have far more leisure time than modern industrial societies) children engage in free play while supervised by communities, and trained in the basic tasks of daily survival as they grow into maturity. The notion that anyone, much less children, should spend a majority of their waking time in performing reptitive work tasks to support commerce, is an artifact of the Industrial Revolution.
Child labor in sweatshops is often literal indentured servitude that is the result of how desperately poor the nations they live in are; Bangledesh, for instance, has a per capita GDP (<US$1o30 for 2016) that is poorer than the United States has been in its entire history. Children are essentially sold off to sweatshops to support their parents, and because of the lack of development or education will almost certainly never rise above abject poverty, a situation which will be made more desperate by higher food prices and shortages, more extreme weather events and disasters, and region strife from climate change-induced political stress. These are people who have no means and no education to move or improve their circumstances, notwithstanding how inhumane it is to treat any children in this fashion.
But hey, feel free to disagree. It’s your right to hold your own opninon, even if it is based upon some groundless fantasy of children happily buzzing away at sewing machines or sewing buttons onto your 2-for-1 priced button down Oxford or sport jersey. But really, if you think it’s not all that bad, you should put your money where your mouth is and spend some of your vacation time volunteering to work in a foreign sweatshop for pennies an hour.
As for children working on the family farm, many farm families struggled to scrimp and save to send at least one, and often all of their children to college or trade school so that they could get away from the backbreaking and often financially desperate existence of small farming. In the days before automation, farming was quite dangerous (and remains one of the occupations with the highest rates of morbidity and mortality) and child injuries and death were not uncommon through accident and infection. It is easy to have a cultural nostalgia for “farm life” when most people are at least two generations away from a hand labor agriculture lifestyle but it does not reflect the reality of that lifestyle.
That’s great but I think people are hesitant to hire the neighbor kid to do work on their property these days. If that kid hurts themselves, the property owner most likely would get sued and could lose everything.
The pottery business went under around the turn of the century for reasons that are unclear. But then the dad/potter opened a store & the kids worked there. Two of the sons from that family were also field hands for a farmer & made extra money from that, then joined the army for WW2.
The girls all married very young–my great grandmother had her age as 16 on the marriage license, but my mom found her birth certificate & she was only 14 when she married. The women, both in their families of origin and after they wed all worked in the home & or family business. I don’t know what social services were like at the time, but the impression I get is that school was not an option because the kids’ labor was needed to keep food on the table & a roof over their heads. That would not be the case today in America, but I can see that it’s like that in many parts of the world & banning child labor would be a disservice to those families.
On both sides of my family, everything changed after WW2 because joining the military opened a lot of doors & many of them got their GEDs, then went to college on the GI bill. After that generation, it seems that all the children went to school.
I was not equating child labor with after school chores. My ancestors had hard lives as children (& adults) and ideally they should have been going to school, rather than working. But the reality of their time is that that was not an option. I am not talking about sweat shops-clearly those are abusive. But if you read the book or saw the movie Lion, it showed a family in India (single mom & 4 kids) living in a 1 room shack & the kids worked instead of going to school because they had to or they wouldn’t eat. This is the case for many people around the world, as it was for my ancestors back in the day.
I teach kids who work every day to pay for family bills–I don’t mean to cover their own expenses, I mean they hand their paychecks over to their parent to pay rent and buy groceries. I have a lot of students who do this–sometimes pretty middle-class kids, whose parents are out of work. More often, very poor kids whose parent(s) just need the help. I have even more who work to cover their own expenses–not just fun extra stuff, but things like clothes and school supplies. None of them romanticize the situation. All of them see their education and their educational opportunities take a hit because they have less energy to bring to school.
For many of these kids, if education were not compulsory, they would leave school because they would think they just had to–too bad, so sad, but the family needs you. They would also have employers who pushed them to miss school to work; they already have employers who push them to blow off studying.
Is it better than starving to death? Sure. Is it desirable? No way.
I’m not aware of anyone that supports children working full time jobs. That’s been illegal for a 100 years.
The traditional model is a kid works a few hours a week for money they can use for personal spending. It might be babysitting, mow yards, raking leaves or other basic tasks. 12 is the minimum age that I’d consider appropriate to start. Even then it should only involve a few hours a week (less than 4 for a 12 year old).
Children aren’t allowed to work at businesses until they turn 16. My first real job was at a Piggly Wiggly and only 16 hours a week. I had to maintain my grades or my parents would have made me quit the job.
As long as they’re getting an education, and safe, working would be great improvement over letting the slobbery smelly little creatures run loose on the internet.
Practically though, we can’t keep all the able adults gainfully employed, what are their pre-human offspring supposed to do?
“Considering children lack the physical strength to produce as much as men in the mines, and given their lower caloric requirements, is it really ethical to have the same minimum wage for them as for adult men? Is it really fair to force employers to pay them so much, under the circumstances?”
“Let’s re-institute the old Apprentice System. Make them work in the mines for a nickel an hour for 7 years because they’re learning a valuable skill.”
I had my first job at age 12, working weekends in a gas station for $0.60 an hour. I thought I was in tall cotton. My parents were quite happy with it.
But that was voluntary. As has been said, if the kid is basically imprisoned in a sweatshop, that’s not a good thing.
I think there’s a couple things here to think about.
just because the alternative is ‘starving to death’ doesn’t make child labor ‘ok’ or somehow good or even not harmful, it only makes it ‘better than’ starving to death, which isn’t at all the same thing as ‘ok.’
It’s an institution-level and society-level problem, so individual reports of happiness aren’t exactly relevant. Even the farming Amish are either getting out of farming into store-keeping or furniture making, or getting really creative with their 8th grade education limit, because to keep farming successfully, they need the knowledge base of computers and automated machinery systems for their way of life to survive. So unless you KNOW that subsistence farming or hand-thrown pottery is the only game in town forever and ever for all your descendants with no changes ever (and to be clear no one can know that), then it’s shortsighted to claim that it ‘isn’t necessary’ or ‘didn’t do them any harm.’
If kids don’t get an education, for whatever reason, it had been well established as a bad thing for that child’s future prospects, and for the stability and flexibility of the society they are in. Contributing to the survival of their family might make it a NECESSARY bad thing, but it doesn’t magically make it a good or even neutral thing.
And I got a paper route at 13. Again, entirely voluntary.
And I’d say there’s a huge difference between children doing chores and helping with the work on a family farm than say, your child getting a job with the factory farm down the road or working in a factory.
Of course, if you’re working your 5 year old children from 5am to midnight 7 days a week on your family farm, then you should be in jail for child abuse.
Child actors - in union productions, at least - get the same pay and residuals as adults, but have some restrictions on hours worked. The production must also pay for tutors if the job is long enough for some school to be missed.