Get a job: After 100 years, states loosen child labor laws
Since America’s rise as a global industrial power, the nation’s use of child labor has only moved in one direction: less of it. Strict regulations and requirements around the jobs and hours minors can work have become the norm in a country where, a little more than a century ago, millions of children labored daily in fields and factories.
Led by state governments, a nation that saw children as necessary participants in the household economy shifted to a nation that saw children as valuable democratic citizens in need of education. And while child labor has never completely disappeared, it has diminished to a supplement of American childhood, not its defining feature.
But is that now beginning to change?
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