cause according to [this article](https://www.historycrunch.com/child-labor-in-the-industrial-revolution.html#/) children as young as 4 years old used to be employed, but that just seems incredibly counter productive. most 4 year olds i know cant even tie their shoes. cause once a child can function without supervision without dying (so 9-12) i can see why from their fucked point of view they would use child labor, but i feel like the resources needed to train and keep the children alive would far outweigh the reward for basically free labor
In: 0
>the resources needed to… …keep the children alive
I’m thinking this is the step that was removed to help productivity. Also they were given very very basic tasks. Repetitive and simple
If kids can help with chores, kids can help with simple work. They shouldn’t, it’s not moral, yes, but they can.
I live in a country where labor is cheap and poor children are abudant. My family has used child labor in the past before btw. So these kids are given simple, repetitive tasks with the reward being food. If you’re starving then of course you will agree to it. A lot of these impoverished kids can’t even have access to drinking water without working.
It’s not like they were employing them as doctors or something requiring years of training. It was simple tasks like, “Stick your arm inside of this machine and pull out the thing that is stuck.” If the machine then crushed the kid, well, just get another one. It’s not like the business owner gave a fuck and lack of safety laws meant that they hadn’t done anything legally wrong.
Probably going to gag a little while doing this
You thinking about it all wrong.
Those aren’t kids, those are small area simple task completers.
You don’t even have to worry about the clumsy or the stupid ones. The machines will take care of those for you, you don’t even have to pay their families so that’s like free labor for a few hours.
What are they going to do quit or complain? You’ve got a line of hungry little task completers out the door that will do damn near anything for a loaf of bread that they can take home to their family.
It’s only counterproductive if you count the harm to them and their deaths as a cost.
Well I pulled a devil’s advocate on this one and now I need a shower
The most compelling theory I’ve read about why kids start becoming picky eaters around age 3 is that it’s at this age that they become able to start helping with small basic tasks away from parents/feeders, like collecting sticks (to be used as firewood). You don’t want a kid off doing simple chores to be shoving any strange item into their mouth, but rather *want* them to be extremely picky about food.
So, kids can definitely be taught to do really basic tasks at quite a young age, and skills will develop as the work continues.
You couldn’t take a spoiled, bored, screen-addicted 6-year-old who has never done a chore in his life, and tell him to go be a chimney sweep and expect him to perform the task perfectly. These kids had exposure to the job and its circumstances, plenty of training and supervision, and experience over time.
**Also**! You should seriously adjust your thinking on the age at which kids can function without much supervision without dying. There are awesome places called “adventure playgrounds” where kids can play with fire, hammers, nails, whatever, with very hands-off supervision (trained people, definitely NOT the kids’ parents), starting at age 5. Kids are really good at taking risks at appropriate levels, when given a wide range of possibilities.
Here is a really cool short video about one such place! [https://www.newday.com/film/land](https://www.newday.com/film/land) [https://youtu.be/kR7QeqLhhSA](https://youtu.be/kR7QeqLhhSA)
Kids ask for less money than adults, and there used to be a lot of very simple jobs that have since been replaced with machines.
There are still a ton of jobs that would be more profitable if done by a clever child rather than a dumb adult, but that’s frowned upon because it keeps children from going to school. Less productivity now in exchange for more productivity later. Although school is also sort of a daycare so that parents have more time to work.
Childhood meant something completely different then, especially for poor people. It wasn’t sentimentalized and if you survived infanthood you were basically a little adult, and as others have pointed out too, poor kids were a dime a dozen and replaceable.
Latest Answers