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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

I didn't grow up poor, but I wasn't given an allowance and there was no expectation of my parents buying frivolous things for us. If I wanted magic cards or to go to a concert I had to pay for it myself. Having a job at a young age taught me the importance of saving and the value of a dollar. It also gave me more ambition, I didn't want to be stuck at the grocery store forever. I moved over to the hardware store at 15 and used the skills there to learn how to build things. Those skills directly transferred into helping friends building robots for the FIRST competition my senior year of high school. We then became world champions, so I guess it worked out for me.

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You’re talking to another person who started working well before turning 18.

I lived and worked in a few places as a teenager, including one where many of my teenage coworkers ended up dropping out of high school to work as close to full-time as they could at the urging of their parents (or grandparents). They worked hard, but I’m sure you can imagine the impact this had on their already shaky prospects. I left and am doing okay, but that wasn’t the norm.

Child labor is a fundamentally different beast across the classes and regions of America, and it’s either naive or disingenuous to pretend kids picking up a little spending money and some life skills is the primary form it takes.

Yeah that's all great, very nice that you had this attitude and for you this was a way to learn the value of money and realize your hobbies. Very good. But I'm sure you can see how for some families this will be the "new normal" - both parents can't afford their rent/medical/energy bills working two full time jobs, so the moment you turn 14 you have to work to help support the family. This isn't some dystopian pessimistic fantasy - this is just how life works in majority of the world already, look anywhere outside of developed world and getting kids to work is normal. It isn't about them being able to afford magic cards - it's about being able to survive. Like others have posted already - if wages for grown ups weren't bad enough, now they will compete with actual kids who can earn less. Is that the market you want for the society around you?

I've seen back breaking poverty, kids as young as 5 breaking rocks into 50 pound bags of gravel making less than $1 a day. My heart weeps for them and I do help them financially by sending them to school.

I don't believe in magical thinking. People will do what they need to in order to survive. I understand why people have such a visceral reaction to kids working, but action is generally better than waiting around for someone to save you.

Yes, I 100% agree with you, and that action is literally anything else than letting kids join the labour pool. If the market is so skewed that you can't make ends meet with 2 full time jobs, it's time for protest, for civil disobedience, for revolution. Letting kids work is a very temporary patch on the shitty situation - in few years even that won't be enough, then what? We bring company town back? You have a house and food provided as long as you work for corporation X, except you can never leave until you're dead? Because that's where this kind of thinking leads to - we allow our working conditions worsen not because of some objective market conditions - but because the mega corporations demand it. It's not even about the elites or 1% - it's about pure unadulterated capitalism.

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