Child labor

Helena Iara wants to help.  We first noticed it the afternoon we were installing the gas line on the new stove, and she wanted to be under the countertop, passing tools to us, or with a hand on the line.  When I led her away, she cried as hard as she has in a long time.  The next day, she wanted to take the laundry off the line, and then the help cut vegetables.  And yesterday, she actually pulled the clean laundry out of the hamper and onto the floor so that she could pass it to us as we hung clothes on the line.  The last was actually pretty fun, and better than kneeling down to grab every scrap from the ground.

Since it's something that Rita and I work on a lot, it seemed to make sense to tell Helena about the history of child labor.  We don't have to accept the most radical of theories of childhood -- like Philipe Ariès, who contends that childhood is really an invention of modernity, and the people before the 18th century saw children as little adults -- to recognize that we see child labor in a very different way today than did a medieval peasant or a the owner of one of the "dark Satanic mills" condemned by Charles Dickens.  First the upper class began to see childhood as a privileged time of learning and play, and that idea gradually became universal: "children's work is learning," as the slogan of one anti-child labor campaign in Latin America put it.

As I explained to Helena on our way to the library today, to say "that idea became universal" makes it seem easy, like some Hegelian hand of History just made it happen.  In the United States, the great change came about not because of the goodness of the elites nor the conscience of intellectuals like Dickens, but because of labor organizers.  The most famous was Mother Jones, the coal mine agitator who organized children from all over the East Coast of the country on a long march at the end of the 19th century, ending in Washington and demanding the abolition of child labor.  If Helena isn't working at five years old, it has a lot to do with good Mother Jones.

On the other hand, working in Latin America has shown the problems with a fundamentalist attitude against children working.  In many indigenous communities, children learn their most important lessons as they work side by side with their parents, who protect them from the hardest labor as they also teach philosophy and physics and weather and farming.  Some of the most able mathematicians I've ever met are child street vendors.  On the other end of the economic scale, some of my most important growing as an adolescent came from jobs coaching soccer to little kids and writing for the local paper, work that would be prohibited as child labor under many laws promoted by UNICEF.

It's a lot to explain to a little girl, but she understood the basic point: she was happy and proud to be able to collaborate with Rita and me in some way (even if, in truth, she mad the work more difficult).  If she continues "working" that way, she'll grow up well.