Working children

This chapter discusses children's engagement in work and how normative understandings of childhood as a time for play, formal schooling and socialisation play out in debates about and experiences of child workers. Ideas about children's development, taken up in national and international policy, frame the debate about working children and distinguishing between work and school, with the view that work is very much at the limits or margins of normative childhood. Indeed, the authors have argued that the cost of schooling is often part of the reason many children work. It could be considered that all children work because, although it is rarely viewed in this way, attendance at school can be conceptualised as a form of work. In the chapter, the authors have argued that children's engagement in work is an activity that takes place in particular cultural and spatial locations, and have specifically discussed work within the home and the role of young carers