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This chapter provides an overview of child labour data by discussing the historical context of data on children's work; available child labour data definitions; methodologies and sources; global estimates on children's work and some discussion on how data collection will be improved in the near future. The growth and development of statistical data collection on child labour has had many positive results, it has at last become possible to monitor accurately trends in child labour and the impact of policies and programmes to address child labour. Perhaps more importantly, the publication of accurate child labour statistics has assisted greatly in harnessing public and political support to reduce the negative consequences of children working.

Child work is a continuum, and there is no clear demarcation of when work moves from a positive experience to a harmful one. In spite of the risks posed by many forms of work, for large numbers of children, the alternative to work may be hunger or other adverse outcomes. This chapter describes the health effects of children's work and the impact of this work on the communities in which they live. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, it examines the difficulties in determining the impact of child labour on health. Second, it describes approaches which can help in understanding the impact of child labour. Third, it presents examples of the impact of child labour on the health of children, families, and communities and how these impacts might be more effectively measured.

This chapter summarizes the key findings that have emerged from an examination of a rights-oriented public health model of child labour. It considers what comprises appropriate child work and makes recommendations for further action to more effectively address child labour. It argues that simple eradication of all children's work is not currently an option. The impact of child labour on health varies and considerable research remains to be done on linking work of different intensities, at particular ages and with regard to gender and socioeconomic circumstances to different outcomes. The harm that children experience manifests itself in many guises with acute, latent, and chronic effects on the child and the wider community. Work that is identified as harmful should be addressed so that either the hazards are eliminated or sufficiently mitigated, or the work is halted. Measures taken to address harm should be undertaken with the community rather than on the community.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the problem of child labor and efforts to reduce and eliminate it across global, national, and local levels. It then discusses how the holistic, ecosystemic perspective of social work is well suited for analyzing and synthesizing the multifaceted, complex, interrelated aspects (i.e., determinants and consequences) of child labor. Social work needs to increase research and action into the determinants and consequences of child labor throughout the world, because it is indeed a global problem.

This chapter first discusses the relationship between education and child labour, then, the evidence for a health-benefit from school participation. It reviews the strategies used by governments and schools to attract and support working children in schools thereby, indirectly, reducing the incidence of child labour. Finally, it presents a broader theoretical overview of the problem of school participation, including non-governmental and grassroots organizing efforts on behalf of working children.

Focusing on debt litigation, this chapter confirms the extent to which male status was competitively gauged. Patriarchal imperatives of male provision and self-sufficient mastery were regularly invoked, demonstrating that appraisals of manhood rooted in economic independence, and heading and maintaining a household, were commonplace. However, evidence of women and children's extensive (and sometimes primary) contributions to the household economy suggests that patriarchal manhood in these terms was a privilege which many men could not afford, if not a chimera. In addition, from the late sixteenth century, increasing numbers of men and women were either excluded from householding positions or chose to adopt alternative family strategies. For these men and women patriarchal behavioural codes were irrelevant, except as the substance of social critiques levelled by their ‘betters’, suggesting the emergence of deepening fissures between concepts of manhood along class lines.

Having a good face-to-face and person-to-person connection will always be hailed as the cornerstone of child bereavement work. Although bereavement services have developed and grown rapidly over the past fifteen years, there are still a number of places where bereavement services are available in every locality. Thanks to the arrival of the telephone, e-mail services, and the Internet, there is now a new twist to the concept of early intervention in trauma support and bereavement. This chapter discusses the creative use of technology that can help shrink the space between the practitioner and the bereaved person.

This chapter examines the introduction of reform to protect children from the negative influence of the night life in American cities during the late 1800s and early 1900s. It explains that working-class children participated in both nightlife and night work. It discusses the creation of supervised recreation centers such as boys’ clubs, the regulation of child labor in the streets, and the implementation of juvenile curfews from 1880 to 1930. This chapter also describes the new institutional framework that was in place to restrict children’s access to urban night in 1930.

This chapter draws on the concept of resilience in examining the effects of children's care work for individual children and young people, focusing on their emotional well being, health and welfare, personal development, aspirations and priorities for the future, as well as the effects on family relationships. It notes that there has been growing recognition that not all young carers experience negative outcomes, and some researchers suggest that a resilience perspective may help to explain individual differences in coping with adversity.

This chapter discusses young people's everyday caring responsibilities within households affected by HIV/AIDS in both the global North and South. It highlights similarities and differences between children's experiences within two divergent socioeconomic and welfare contexts. The chapter discusses the range of support that children provide for their parents/relatives, and explores gendered and temporal aspects of children's care work, drawing on young people's narratives, diaries, drawings, and photographs of their daily routines and caring responsibilities.

This chapter discusses resilience and impacts of children's care work in families affected by HIV/AIDS within the domains of the school and wider community. It explores the ways that children and parents/relatives with HIV draw on social ties, networks, and informal safety nets in the school environment and community in order to deal with household crisis and mitigate their vulnerability.

This chapter outlines a methodology for child-centered ethnographic work in both Catholic parishes and evangelical Christian homes and churches, which includes observing, participating, and interviewing children about both formal rituals, such as First Communion, and informal rituals, such as vacation Bible school. Rather than present a formula for researchers to follow, the chapter proposes a variety of methodological tools meant to help create a productive environment in which to interview children. These tools were developed with two foundational principles in mind: allowing children to shape the research and creating an environment in which the researcher made it clear that they were there to learn the children's perspective on their religious tradition, a subject in which they are understood as the experts.

Child involvement in economic activity is pervasive in today’s less developed countries—over 260 million working children according to the latest reliable estimates. The evidence available suggests that child work was also widespread in most European countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What do we know about Italy? No official estimates of the incidence of child work exist, nor are there any sources providing readily available quantitative information on the topic. This chapter fills that gap. We find that on the whole the industrialization of the country, which started in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was benevolent toward children: child employment dropped sharply between 1881 and 1911. The literacy of the adult population was the most powerful driving force enabling children to avoid entering the workforce—more than income, more than the role of laws and the provision of school facilities by the government.

The introduction sets the context for the study of street vending children who work side by side with their undocumented parents in Los Angeles. This chapter outlines the various strategies the researcher used to enter the field, recruit the families, and establish rapport with the children and their parents. The author also describes the research site and the research methodology. The author is reflexive about her insider and outsider position and describes how having worked as a young girl with her parents both in Mexico and the United States helped her gain the trust of her respondents. In addition, the introduction situates the role of children and work in a historical context and provides a theoretical framework to help understand the lives of child vendors in Los Angeles. The experience of child street vendors bridges intersectionality theory, social capital theory, and the socialization of childhood and brings to light the hidden resources that are overshadowed by segmented assimilation theory, the leading theory that has been used to understand the experience of post-1965 immigrants and their children. The chapter also introduces the four overarching research questions that guide this research and provides a roadmap of the book.

This chapter reviews what is believed as the major future challenges facing research, policy and practice in the field of child and family social work, not only in the Nordic countries but also beyond. The first topic addressed is the interrogation of a Nordic welfare model. The second future challenge — of interrogating power relations within different welfare systems — has also been the inspiration for several of the chapters in this book. To achieve the first two objectives set out in this chapter — developing more complex understandings of welfare systems and more effectively interrogating power relations operating within them — we need to adopt more complex and sophisticated understandings of societal power relations in the analyses. That therefore relates to the third and final pathway described. The intersectional perspectives on power might well involve contradictions or paradoxes.

Chapter 4 shows the children's resiliency that results from experiencing their parents’ position of oppression, which helps prevent an authority shift in favor of the children. Consequently, the children respect their parents’ work effort and report feeling closer to their parents. As a result of working together, children become keenly aware of the financial household and street vending obligations. I call this economic empathy and argue that this level of empathy is born when families develop a communal family obligation code. The chapter covers different forms of tensions between children and their parents and how children engage in family bartering with their parents. These street vending children feel torn between their responsibility to help their parents and their desire to enjoy a “normal” childhood. Overall, economic empathy can serve to buffer against dissonant acculturation.

Burt frequently pointed out that the average IQ of middle-class children might be, indeed was, higher than that of working-class children, but the fact that there were so many more of the latter than of the former meant that there were actually more working-class than middle-class children with an IQ of, say, 115 or more. In spite of which, the vast majority of university students came from middle-class backgrounds. If this might, even today, be regarded as a reasonably liberal point of view, some of Burt's other attitudes towards educational selection, undoubtedly progressive in the 1920s and 1930s, were widely denounced as reactionary in the 1950s and 1960s by progressive educational thinkers and politicians.

This chapter provides the readers with a clear sense of what is physically involved in this line of work for children and parents. The chapter describes what children do on a typical day, what kinds of jobs children do, how old they are when they start working, and how these different tasks are initiated. The chapter identifies three different work patterns for working children: (1) vacation work, (2) weekends only, and (3) school nights and weekends. Some children of street vendors also opt out of street vending altogether. In this chapter, we see the fluidity of their intersectional childhood, as they are nurtured by their parents and also nurture their parents. Children's voices and desires for material goods, combined with the structural circumstances that push the families to street vend, inform the ongoing sociological debate about structure and agency through the children's perspective.

This chapter challenges segmented assimilation theory by looking at parent–child work relations. Unlike the parents in this study, all of the children I interviewed speak English and are familiar with American culture and technology, and the majority of the children are also U.S. citizens. These are resources unique to the children and I call these American generational resources (AGRs). I argue that children in street vending families share power in the household because they contribute to their family's income, and they are involved in business negotiations and decision-making processes. These children and youth speak English and enjoy legal status while most of their parents remain undocumented and are Spanish monolinguals. Segmented assimilation theory contends that this power imbalance in favor of the children could result in dissonant acculturation. Contrary to what segmented assimilation theory would predict, parents’ authority over their children is not diminished as a result of children's faster acculturation. Rather, parents who work with their children have more control over their children because they spend more time with them. In addition, children's AGRs are valued resources by their parents and are frequently useful for the family street vending business.

The conclusion tackles an important and controversial question rooted in our normative and privileged notions of childhood life: Should children work to help support the family? In answering this question, the conclusion shows how the social construction of childhood defined as a period of freedom and play has been cemented in the minds of people for almost a century. Even the families interviewed for this book struggled to see their family work arrangement as “normal” and fully acceptable to others. This chapter returns to the initial queries about childhood, family work relations, intergenerational family dynamics, and ethnic entrepreneurship and asks more questions for future research, keeping as a core analysis the role of children as economic contributors in the family beyond the street vending occupation. Kids at Work, in a way, also tells the story of many more first-generation college students of diverse racial backgrounds who did not have “normal” childhoods because they too had to work to help the family.