Your vote and how to use it

by Gertrude Foster Brown

To allow children to enter the industrial world at an early age, without preparation, and with no guidance as to the sort of work for which they are best fitted, is unfair to them. The boy or girl who gets a job at fourteen, without any vocational training, is apt to remain an unskilled worker all his or her life. The range of occupations open to such children is small. The largest number of boys who go to work at an early age become delivery boys, errand or wagon boys, or newsboys. There is little chance among these employments for real training or for any future advancement.

A careful study, by the National Child Labor Committee, of certain cases brought into the Children’s Court, has established the fact that a large proportion of the boys and girls who come into the court come from the ranks of child workers. This investigation has also proved the need of adequate vocational guidance. The present school course gives little help in this direction to children who are leaving school at fourteen or fifteen, and parents are often as ignorant of industrial conditions as the children. After a few years in an occupation that offers no opportunity for development, the boy or girl who went to work so young is often left stranded, not only untrained, but demoralized.

There is need also of making parents understand that better opportunities are open to children who have had education beyond the elementary grades.

Street Trades of all kinds are regarded by social experts as unsafe for children. Some authorities recommend the absolute prohibition of all street trading for boys under seventeen. These trades, including selling newspapers, appeal to boys because they like the excitement of street life, and the spending-money which they give them.

A judge of the Detroit Juvenile Court says, “At least fifty per cent. of the boys brought into the juvenile court are newsboys.” An old newsboy, when asked what night work on the streets had done for him, said: “When I was a kid, it wasn’t like it is now. They didn’t have no midnight edition—I always had to be home by eight o’clock. When I got to selling at night I started in high school, but when it came time for the first examination, I said, ‘Oh, I’ll just quit. I’d rather be out on the streets, anyway.’” In Baltimore it is estimated that 45 per cent. of all the children in the near-by reform school have been street workers.

Investigations have proved the theory is false that a child is usually put to work “to support a widowed mother.” More often the child in a street trade is found to come from a home where there is no need of his work, and in these trades the earnings of children are very small. In a recent investigation, in Seattle, the earnings of newsboys were found in 46 per cent. of the cases of the elementary school paper-sellers to be less than $5 a month.

The night messenger service is known to be a demoralizing occupation, unfit for any small boy, and in New York it is prohibited to all boys under twenty-one. The same protection of the law is now needed for girls.

Many parents do not realize the serious results of letting their children go to work too young, or the bad effects of over-work on them. The tendency of over-fatigue is to break down the moral resistance. The release from supervision which is brought about by their wage-earning, and the danger of their having money of their own to spend, added to the interruption of their education, cannot help but have a demoralizing effect on them.

Rural Child Workers are quite as common as city workers, but they are not so often wage-earners. Their labor is usually taken by parents as a matter of course, and they are not paid. Farming and housework are two occupations which engage many children, and there is almost a complete absence of laws regulating them.

A distinction should be made between the farmer lad who does “chores” night and morning, and the boy who is kept out of school most of the year to be a farm-hand; and between the girl who helps her mother out of school hours, and the girl who is kept at work in a canning-factory, and goes from one to another as fruits and vegetables ripen; but neither the chores nor the housework should be allowed to interfere with the regularity of school attendance. The boy who is kept at farm labor, without education, and the girl who is kept at work in the canning industry at the expense of her schooling, are as much in the ranks of child laborers as the cotton-mill workers, and they suffer in the same way from lack of training for a useful future.