From Research Changes Ideas About Children and Work:
When Americans think about child labor in poor countries, they rarely picture girls fetching water or boys tending livestock. Yet most of the 211 million children, ages 5 to 14, who work worldwide are not in factories. They are working in agriculture — from 92 percent in Vietnam to 63 percent in Guatemala — and most are not paid directly.‘Contrary to popular perception in high-income countries, most working children are employed by their parents rather than in manufacturing establishments or other forms of wage employment,’ two Dartmouth economists, Eric V. Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik, wrote in ‘Child Labor in the Global Economy,’ published in the Winter 2005 Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Families don’t make their children work out of heartless callousness:
When he started working on child labor issues six years ago, Professor Edmonds said in an interview, “the conventional view was that child labor really wasn’t about poverty.” Children’s work, many policy makers believed, “reflected perhaps parental callousness or a lack of education for parents about the benefits of educating your child.” So policies to curb child labor focused on educating parents about why their children should not work and banning children’s employment to remove the temptation.Recent research, however, casts doubt on the cultural explanation. “In every context that I’ve looked at things, child labor seems to be almost entirely about poverty. I wouldn’t say it’s only about poverty, but it’s got a lot to do with poverty,” Professor Edmonds said.
As families’ incomes increase, children tend to stop working and, where schools are available, they go to school. If family incomes drop, children are more likely to return to work.
When Vietnam suddenly allowed rice exports, it made rice farming much more lucrative:
In the interview, Professor Edmonds said he expected that the booming market for rice would lead more children to work in agriculture, if only on their own families’ farms, because the value of their labor had risen substantially. But that was not what happened.“Instead, it looks like what households did was, with rising income, they purchased substitutes for child labor. They used more fertilizers. There was more mechanization, more purchasing of tools,” he said, adding, “It was the opposite of what I expected to find coming in.”