Adolescents working in Dhaka, Bangladesh. BBC World Service/Flickr. CC (by-nc)
In the name of child protection, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) promote the worldwide adoption and enforcement of a policy that seeks to ban most children below the age of adolescence from working. This is articulated through the ILO’s Minimum Age Convention (No. 138) and through corresponding national “minimum age” laws, all of which are being lauded right now at the IV World Conference on the Eradication of Child Labour.
The desire to separate children from work is rooted in a culturally peculiar idea contrary to social science findings and much child-rearing wisdom. This holds that there is something “unnatural” about children engaging in even properly supervised part-time work, and that work somehow undermines childhood and impedes or distorts children’s development.
