Is child labor really so bad?

[Flyer]

@MrDibble

Is it? What are you defining as “modern”? You should know Centuries of Childhood is woefully out of date and has been successfully rebutted several times.

What is a modern invention is the extended childhood of the “teenager”, but pre-teen childhood is far from a modern invention.

You are using your own definition of childhood, not the one that I gave.

@Stranger_On_A_Train

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.

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.

These two paragraphs are using two different definitions of childhood. The first one is your own; the second one is mine.

[Two_Many_Cats]

@Voyager

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.

That’s the way to do child labor.

I dunno, some of those former child actors are really screwed up.

[jtur88]

@Two_Many_Cats

I dunno, some of those former child actors are really screwed up.

Any more so than actors who were not child actors?

[Merneith]

@Enola_Gay

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.

So the children in your family - the ones who were raised by the generation that left school early and all went into menial labor - their children, were made to get full educations. Following WW2, the children of the child laborers, were given a chance to improve themselves, and the child laborers made sure their own children took it. Right?

Ask your mom what her grandmother would have said if you mom wanted to quit school and focus on housewifery at 14. Is that what you want for your own kids, Enola?

[Yllaria]

@Enola_Gay

I’m defining child labor as a child spending his/her ‘school day’ working instead of going to school (8am-3pm in my world, September to June). Work load may be very light or heavy, depending on the season, but overall the hours would average out to be similar to an American kid’s school day. . . .

Working on the family farm or in the family business is specifically excluded from the US definition of child labor. Except for requiring that children go to school, that sort of work is completely legal. It’s also exempt from minimum wage within the family business, if I remember correctly.

I’m also wondering why you describe going to school as “play all day”? Others have mentioned working before and after school. If the family needs the labor, it’s even possible to have a high-schooler enter a work/study program that lowers the hours they spend at school so that they can spend more time working.

In some cases, having young children at school frees their mother or older sister to work, rather than spending the time watching children young enough that their labor is not worth a great deal.

@StraightTalk

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.

People are hesitant to hire kids they don’t know or kids that they know have no experience working. If they know the kid’s parents and have seen the kid working properly on their own property and being taught how to work safely, there’s not much resistance. I’ll admit that fewer people are teaching their children how to use tools, but that’s because fewer people know how themselves.

Every child should be taught to work. Some families are good at teaching at least some kinds of work and some aren’t. I can’t really speak to situations where there is no education available or the family is starving. In general, an education is better. Learning to work with your family is also good, when the family is good at that.

[MrDibble]

@Flyer

You are using your own definition of childhood

No, I’m using the definition - “the period between birth and adolescence”. And saying that premoderns did, as can clearly be shown, see it as a time of (relatively) carefree innocence (your own definition).

[Enola_Gay]

@Merneith

So the children in your family - the ones who were raised by the generation that left school early and all went into menial labor - their children, were made to get full educations. Following WW2, the children of the child laborers, were given a chance to improve themselves, and the child laborers made sure their own children took it. Right?

Ask your mom what her grandmother would have said if you mom wanted to quit school and focus on housewifery at 14. Is that what you want for your own kids, Enola?

No I don’t want that for my own kids & thanks to the sacrifices of my ancestors, we have better options. But if I were a single mom living in India, I might make the decision to have my children work to help future generations. In my family, life seemed to get better with each new generations. Went from starving in Ireland, to not starving in America but kids had no education, to living better and kids had some education but still worked, to living well & kids are all educated. I’m wondering if this same pattern might be the way out of poverty in other parts of the world today.

And my mother is dead, so I can’t ask her but I’m sure her mom wouldn’t have wanted her to quit school at 14, unless that was the better option.

ETA I saw an interview with Saroo Brierly (featured in the movie Lion) & he seemed to think that the new child labor laws in India would do a disservice to the extreme poor, if they were actually enforced.

[MacLir]

@Voyager

I bet pottery is no different. In 20 years it is not going to just involve the art of potting, but also how to program a 3-d printer to produce pieces.

Paradoxically, this may make the ability to hand-throw a pot even more valuable. A program on a 3-D printer will turn out any number of identical items, but a hand made item is Art. :dubious:

[MacLir]

@GreenWyvern

I don’t think this is true. Can you give any examples?

Ethelred the Unready. Just off the top of my head. :rolleyes:

[Voyager]

@MacLir

Paradoxically, this may make the ability to hand-throw a pot even more valuable. A program on a 3-D printer will turn out any number of identical items, but a hand made item is Art. :dubious:

Yeah, unique pots will be more valuable - so they’ll program the 3-d printer to make one which are slightly different. It will be easy to do.
Potters who create truly unique pieces will still be in demand. And copied. Think of fashion. The benefit of being an artist will be licensing your designs.

Run of the mill potters will be in trouble.

[MandaJo]

@Enola_Gay

No I don’t want that for my own kids & thanks to the sacrifices of my ancestors, we have better options. But if I were a single mom living in India, I might make the decision to have my children work to help future generations. In my family, life seemed to get better with each new generations. Went from starving in Ireland, to not starving in America but kids had no education, to living better and kids had some education but still worked, to living well & kids are all educated. I’m wondering if this same pattern might be the way out of poverty in other parts of the world today.

And my mother is dead, so I can’t ask her but I’m sure her mom wouldn’t have wanted her to quit school at 14, unless that was the better option.

ETA I saw an interview with Saroo Brierly (featured in the movie Lion) & he seemed to think that the new child labor laws in India would do a disservice to the extreme poor, if they were actually enforced.

Your thesis seems to be “child labor is better that starving” . I don’t think anyone would argue with that. That doesn’t make it good, or desirable. And while there may be situations where that is the best option at that time, child labor is still a symptom of a broken system.

Imagine a factory owner reaping significant profits on the backs of underpaid children. He says “this isn’t so bad. It’s only 48 hours a week, and without the income they’d starve”. From the kids’ point of view, the job is better than starving. But the factory owner is ignoring his own role: he could pay the adults that work in the factory a living wage so their kids don’t have to work. He could pay the kids more so they don’t have to work as much. He could install a school and let them work half the time and learn half the time. “At least they aren’t starving” is what you say when you run a Victorian workhouse.

Now, if someone is running a factory on a shoestring, as a non-profit, to provide jobs for kids who would otherwise starve, that’s a really different thing. But I don’t think it’s usually the case.