Most working children today labour for their parents, not for factories
The image of child labour is a Victorian mill or a sweatshop floor. The modern reality looks different: most child workers toil on farms or in informal trades, usually alongside family, and fewer than 3 per cent of those aged 5 to 14 work away from their household. Poverty and missing schools drive it.
Laws around the world ban work that keeps children out of school or harms them, but they carve out exceptions, such as child performers, household chores, supervised training and certain work done by Amish children. In pre-industrial societies there was little idea of childhood as a separate stage; young people joined in farming, hunting and child rearing once able, and skills passed on through apprenticeship rather than classrooms.
Britain's Industrial Revolution, from the late 18th century, turned villages such as Manchester and Birmingham into cities hungry for cheap hands. In 1788, children made up two-thirds of the workforce in 143 water-powered cotton mills in England and Scotland, and their pay could be as low as a tenth of a man's. Boys as young as four swept chimneys, and Percivall Pott's identification of a cancer among sweeps became the first recognised occupational cancer. Britain passed its first child labour law in 1803, Lord Shaftesbury campaigned for more, and the need for educated workers eventually brought compulsory schooling.
America followed a similar arc. About 1.7 million children under fifteen worked in its industry by 1900, and more than 2 million by 1910, in coal mines, canneries and textile mills. Lewis Hine photographed them between 1908 and 1917 for the National Child Labor Committee. Regulation had an unexpected side effect: work migrated from factories into homes, where children helped parents assemble goods.
Globally, the World Bank says the share of children working fell from 25 per cent to 10 per cent between 1960 and 2003. Yet UNICEF and the ILO still estimated 168 million child labourers aged 5 to 17 in 2013. Agriculture employs about 60 per cent of them, and roughly 70 per cent live in rural areas. In the poorest countries around one child in five was working as of 2023, with sub-Saharan Africa hit hardest. UNICEF finds boys and girls equally likely to work, though girls do far more unpaid housework.
Source: Child labour
