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With May comes the first days of spring, marked in many different ways around the world. Spring brings life, love, joy, new planting seasons, and the return of sunny weather that can lift the spirits, especially if you tend to spend your winter months stuck indoors. For many, May Day is a popular way to celebrate the first days of spring, with songs, and flowers, and dancing around a MayPole. Some who participate in this tradition may know its ties to the historic labor movements that fought for fair pay, reasonable hours, employee benefits, and an end to child labor. Others may not.
What may also be unfamiliar to many is that the fight to end child labor is far from over. Around the world, child labor and child poverty remain significant barriers to safety and success for children. The causes of these social ills are varied, numerous, and inextricably linked. Children living in poverty are more likely to find themselves exploited for their labor, and the conditions they work in are often unsafe, prone to further exploitation or abuse, or are outright illegal. In 2018, the US Census Bureau reported at least 31.8 million people living in poverty, many of them children and families. With this financial insecurity comes risks such as homelessness, food insecurity, lack of access to quality medical care resulting in substantial health care disparities, increased risk for trauma, and even a reduced average lifespan. The inequitable distribution of resources fails our children in life threatening ways, from environmental injustice, to over-policing of poor and marginalized communities, to inadequate and unsafe low-income housing, to the monopoly-driven baby formula shortage currently threatening the lives of millions of infants across the United States, and the history of overpriced and contaminated or subpar baby formula being offloaded in impoverished countries. Parents who cannot afford to feed their child safely and consistently are being failed by systems of governance and labor that deny the financial realities of poverty in the modern age.
Many of the metrics we use to measure poverty have not been re-evaluated or adequately adjusted for modern financial realities for decades. And critically, they fail to account for what is likely half of child poverty in the United States alone. Without being able to meet the federal poverty line, these children and their families are often ineligible for critical financial aid services that could help them survive (though it bears saying that many of these social support systems themselves are in dire need of an overhaul to address inflation and adjustment to modern financial need as well). Children in these families are just as likely as their federally recognized counterparts to struggle with the realities of poverty and to be at higher risk for the same quality of life outcomes. When we consider the educational inequities that reinforce these children’s socio-economic position and entrench them further in poverty by denying them access to quality education, this becomes a self-replicating cycle. The American dream that a child born in poverty can lift themselves by their bootstraps with hard work, dedication, and a little good fortune is largely a myth. Most children born in poverty struggle with financial stability throughout their lives. We as a society do not give them an opportunity to do otherwise.
There are many adjustments, both small and large that could impact children’s ability to escape economic instability. Doing so would not be enough on its own to end child labor, but we know that giving parents the tools to support their children independently is an effective way to reduce both child poverty and the socio-economic forces that drive children towards economic and labor exploitation. By and large, families do not want to live in uncertainty and instability. Security and confidence in one’s ability to survive is itself a basic necessity for social-emotional well-being, especially for developing young minds. Very few parents want a life of poverty and hardship for their children. But we need to first acknowledge the true scale and impact of our global child poverty and child exploitation crisis. In the spirit of May Days past, let’s choose to fight for children’s right to truly be children. To focus on learning, on play, on growth, and on the personal development of self they will need to become strong, confident adults. Poverty is not a punishment for having kids, rather it is our job as a society, to take responsibility for the next generation together, and leave them a better world for their own children to come. |
