The document summarizes the conditions faced by children during the Industrial Revolution. It describes how children as young as 4 years old were forced to work long hours in dangerous factory conditions for low pay. Many worked over 12 hours a day tending machines. Orphans and homeless children had little choice but to work to survive. Literary works like Oliver Twist highlighted the abuse and hardships children endured. While some regulations were later introduced to limit child labor, it remained a widespread problem for many years due to families' economic needs.
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The Impact of Child Labor During the Industrial Revolution
1.
2. A revolution produces a change of epoch, of thoughts, in economies and forms of
government, etc. However, a revolution does not always move forward in a
positive way. That is why it is important to learn and understand what is being
talked about when the revolution is mentioned.
Revolutions always happen for the benefit of one sector and to the detriment of
another.
In the Industrial Revolution, the capitalist state began its boom and favored the
bourgeois class of that time, which became the ruling class.
Let's see what happened to the kids.
The lives of rich children were very different from that of the poor…
3. Some thinkers, who postulated that a worker and his wife healthy, could support a
maximum of two children and recommended that all children over three years of age
be taught to earn a living working, where they would be given sustenance. This will
prevent lower-class children from becoming criminals.
Factory owners didn't have the power to force anyone to take a job in a factory. They
could only hire people willing to work for the salaries they offered. No matter how
low they were, they were much more than these poor people could earn in any other
activity. The factories took the housewives away from their children. And the children
of their games. But these women had nothing to cook and feed their children, and
those children were homeless, on the street and starved to death. His only salvation
was the factory.
4. Many children earned a few pennies as chimneys cleaners, cleaning roads, toy or
flower sellers and as carrying luggage or packages.
Other children worked with their parents at home or in small, dirty workshops,
sewing clothes, pulls out or shoes and in the field.
5. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the hiring of many children in huge
factories. Children went to work, up to 12 hours a day, at the insistence of
their parents. The work was almost always very easy, usually tending a
spinning or knitting machine, and retying the knots.
They were often the operators of the most dangerous machinery. Some
large machines, were very easy to operate or if they were damaged, to
access, the ideal size, was that of a child.
6. Many boys also served in homes of
wealthy families. In 1850 one in nine girls
around the age of 10 worked on them.
Orphans, as soon as they turned 4, were
sold by orphanages. It was also legal to
"capture" homeless children and force
them into a slavery regime.
They often experienced violence at home,
school, and work. Many poor and
orphaned children survived by joining
street gangs and taking the path of crime.
Adult death, at a average age of 40, came
from tuberculosis, while children's deaths
often resulted in smallpox, measles and
also hunger.
7. In the mid-19th century, regulation of child labour began, in countries such as England.
Children under the age of 9 were banned from inserting, restricting schedules and
forcing companies to provide them with school learning. Successive Factory Laws put
more and more restrictions on the employment of children and adolescents. But child
labour was not completed by legislative decree. It was when their parents' income was
sufficient to support them. The emancipators and benefactors of these children were
not bureaucrats or factory inspectors, but manufacturers and bankers. His efforts and
investments in machinery led to an increase salary, ever lower prices, and an
unparalleled improvement in overall living standards.
8. Some literary authors of that time, narrated the life of
those children. Charles Dickens, in his work "Oliver Twist",
puts his attention on the poor, condemns the abuse and
denounces the story of Oliver, a child who had the
misfortune of being born at the height of the English
Industrial Revolution, in the years where the the brute
force of steel began to replace man, in the era of coal
machines that demanded a permanent effort, to keep
them on.
He is representative of the painful experiences of those
children forced to work in adult spaces.
The sad thing is that today, more than 150 years after his
Oliver Twist, if Dickens raised his head and depending on
which part of the world he looked at, he could rewrite it.
And in the middle of the 21st century it still endures, in
some parts of the world.