Burkina Faso. Ollivier Girard/CIFOR/Flickr. CC (by-nc-nd)
In many parts of the world and in many cultures, children grow up by imitating, and gradually contributing to, the activities taking place around them, including work. Work is a normal part of life and children increasingly participate as they grow up to be responsible social people. There are numerous instances of children’s lives being disrupted and damaged by attempts to protect working children by prohibiting them from working, a good number of which have been discussed on this website. Many other children grow up deprived of benefits that appropriate work could have conveyed. Children all too frequently pay the price when people behind policy and intervention are so tied up with the perceived risks of children’s work that they ignore the benefits that work conveys. I shall consider why this happens, but first I shall briefly outline some of the key benefits of work for children and young people.1
Economic benefits
The most obvious benefit from work is economic. The importance of this benefit for those in extreme poverty or in severe crisis, when children’s work is necessary to provide for survival, is obvious to all. But it is precisely in such cases that work becomes excessive and often hazardous, and children’s agency becomes very constrained: harmful child labour becomes an indicator that something is wrong. Intervention is urgent to relieve the poverty and material needs that lie behind the work: indeed, the ILO has embarked on programmes of poverty relief,2 which is the only way likely to improve the situation for children.3
