ABSTRACT
Here’s an important and tantalizing debate, applying to childhood the kind of discussion that models of modernity have provoked in other aspects of contemporary life. For many children still in the labor force, rather than primarily focused on schooling, key experiences resemble what children in Western Europe, the United States and Japan encountered a century or a century and a half ago. Traditional family economies are eroding, if only because of rapid urbanization and the incapability of rural families to provide. In this context a good bit of children’s work becomes novel, even though the fact of child labor is not; and this sometimes involves increased exploitation and new vulnerabilities. Many girls in India or Africa are today working as domestic servants in the cities, just as in Paris or New York in the 1850s; some are also sexually exploited on the job, as in the West before. Street trades, begging and petty crime draw many children, as in Charles Dickens’s London. In the West and Japan, of course, conditions later changed, after this long and often painful transition; the modern model came largely to predominate even for most children in the lower classes, though it brought its own problems. Will further economic development and protective legislation, including pressures by global standards, move the poorer children of India or East Africa, or their descendants, into the more standard model over the next decades? Or are local traditions or permanent economic inequalities, often worsened by the new effects of disease and war, going to sustain a durable division in childhood around the globe, not only by social class but also by region?
