Child Labor

Child Labor was started in the 1800s when the Industrial Revolution took place. It was the work of children as young as 4 years old, working in factories around dangerous machines every day. It deprived the children of their natural childhood, and were working as much as 64 hours a week, for an extremely low pay. In the early 1900s, thousands of boys were working around extreme heat in a glass making factory. They would work without a break from this heat for hours, causing them to have eye trouble, lung ailments, heat exhaustion, cuts, and burns. As time went on, in the early 1900s children as young as 3 were being employed in these dangerous factory's, and a high number were working as prostitutes. Children were rolling cigarettes, worked in coal mines, and rotted away in canaries. By the 1900s, there were at least 1.7 million children doing child labor.

Child labor was terrible. I love kids, and to hear of them being hurt in any way breaks my heart. The fact that people didn't realize how dangerous this was back then also hurts, because it's like they didn't care what happened to the poor children, they just care about the factory and dangerous machines that the children worked around. Today,  in developing countries child labor still lives. Poverty forces people to send their children to work to more money for the family. Today, the types of work children do are usually agriculture. Farming, dairy, fisheries and forestry may be slightly less dangerous, but the fact that the children working there may be as young as 5, child labor is still a problem in our world today.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour