The knowledge of children’s participation in productive activities of México: results of the contribution from the house chores

This work’s purpose is to present the theoretical-methodological elements to study house chores as a dimension of the participation of boys and girls in the economy —or in productive activities—, showing Mexico’s preliminary results from 1994 to 2004. The domestic chores, the commercial and non-commercial production and the monetary income constitute the operational subdimensions of such participation, that we define as our research object. The conceptual and methodological proposal developed to generate an integral measure of children’s economic participation can be linked to the debate over the incorporation of the unpaid domestic services in the measurement of child labour (International Work Conference, 2008), but its final use is wider: to contribute to the knowledge of expressions inequality on infancy by means of the study of the performance of children’s population in productive activi- ties and of monetary contribution derived from it, incorporating gender perspective, poverty conditions and the stratum, as some of the main analytical axis