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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

Wow. That caption. "Young boys who work at the hotel." Just put out there, casually, like child labor is no big thing.

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Even in the USA kids are allowed to work, either paid or unpaid. There is insufficient information to decide if this is exploitative labor or not.

I’m guessing you don’t have many friends that grew up rural?

You're right. It just surprised me.

What is the view on Girl Scouts selling cookies? Or Boy Scouts selling popcorn?

They're not really working in that scenario - they are fund raising for their group which may be considered an exercise in interacting with other people, marketing, selling, and the value of money that helps their organization. This may sound similar to working but one is for fun and the other is more for survival and sustenance.

You’re saying the definition of working is not tied to the activity but rather the motive?

Looking at the population pyramid of Afghanistan, it has about as many youngsters under 18 as people in the 18-60 age bracket.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/afghanistan/2023/

With a population structure like this, you don't really have any choice but to tap at least part of the under-18 population into the workforce. Western societies at the same level of development did precisely the same.

If you're American there are certainly kids working in your community. not even illicitly. It's generally legal for kids of any age to work for their parents if the parents own the business. For example, if a family owns a B&B, they might put their kids to work doing simple chores around the business.

You never worked while you were young? Like deliver papers or McDonald’s or even tutoring?

When I started delivering the Milwaukee Sentinel in the winter of 1960 at age 12, carrying my papers in saddlebags on the back of my bike, I thought it wasn't all that bad considering I made about $5/7-day-week & my allowance was 25 cents.

Looking back I'm amazed I didn't seem to think being out in heavy snow and below-zero weather in the dark was a terrible thing.

Pushing that bike uphill a half mile to the paper drop depot at 4:30 am on school days and weekends didn't seem all that bad, nor did having to perfectly place each subscriber's paper so as to encourage them to give me a 10 cent tip when I went to collect each month.

Bonus: I got home around 6:30 am, in time to get another hour's sleep before school.

I suspect that child labor is relatively low on Afghanistan’s list of problems.

Here's a good documentary on a bigger problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWeRAlJQI0c

Behind child unemployment?

In many countries it isn't.

I know. I think it just shocked me. I would like to live in a world where childhood is universally the time in everyone's life for play and education.

I mean, won't kids in your imaginary world have chores? Learning to cook or clean is also education (the alternative would be: ever heard of the anecdote of young adults who go to college and don't know how to do laundry?). Sadly for this remote part of Afghanistan in the next few years, practical education is probably going to be more useful compared to book education.

And maybe I'm just romanticizing the concept, but I imagine the kids would be mostly running around playing on the hotel grounds, and once in a while a bunch of travellers would show up, and the hotel caretaker would then yell for the kids to help prepare tea or food for them.

OP lives in a fantasy world where every culture should be bulldozed to make way for endless middle class cul-de-sacs and McMansions. It's perfectly normal in most of the world for children to be involved in family businesses or even working to help support the family, rather than living in some entitled bubble where they're the center of everything.

You could have made your point more effectively without the insults and the sleights.

Hey, that's where I live!

How do you know they are all family and not child labor working to help their families? After all child labor isn't a foreign concept in Afghanistan:

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/31/1143143252/afghanistan-taliba...

I find it strange that child labor invokes such a strong feeling in any article about EV, being associated with cobalt mining, yet it receives such a glove treatment in this discussion.

Since I joined in on this thread, my "glove treatment" might be romanticizing it, but "helping out" in a quiet hotel/guest house in the mountains is surely a lot more kid-compatible than a coalmine. The top commenter's comment that the article glossed over the fact that kids were made to work in such a place feels overblown. Hey maybe the reality of this hotel work is a bit harsher, but since the reporter didn't shine a light on it, I'd assume she also judged the same way.

If the article was about a coal mine and the NYT just glossed over the fact of child labor, then I would agree with such a comment; an article glossing over child labor in a coal mine would be shitty.

Edit to add: I like your angle about "It must be an anti-EV brigade!" though, keep on investigating, you're on to a conspiracy! /s

Throughout human history, children were seen as supportive to the labor of the parents. I recall reading articles recently that were pointing out that this cultural change in attitude towards children may be what is driving declining birthrates: children have changed from assisting in life (in a limited capacity) to being a liability like an expensive pet. A child will not help out in an office job like a child can help in a family run corner store, restaurant or farm.

Certainly I mowed the lawn, washed dishes, cooked, weeded gardens, fed livestock and pets, painted the house, and many more chores. I am not sure I was a net positive even with all that. My parents certainly didn't exploit me, and my parents had worked a lot harder on their parents farms without it being exploitive.

Childhood is universally a time of newness and innocence. There is no need to shelter children from the reality of this world and I think society does a huge disservice by trying to maintain ignorance (while characterizing it as innocence) in children and then suddenly laments how irresponsible they are at 18.

There's that and there is the simple fact that children are now expected to live so there isn't as much need for 'redundancy' to put it bluntly. Up to my grandparents generation it wasn't rare at all to lose one or more children.

From my understanding, recently, "getting enough food" has been the biggest worry for children in Afghanistan, not whether they're doing some work or not.

I was selling fruits to tourists at about 9 or 10 during summers. Tought me a lot. Not to make an argument from my personal anecdotes, but not all “child labor” is bad.

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