Child poverty

“ Without doubt, it is a hardship to families in poverty that strong, growing children should not be permitted to go to work and help support those in need, but it is better for the social body to take care of its weak members in some other way, and for its own sake, as well as for the sake of the child, to make sure that he is physically and mentally equipped before he takes a regular place in the ranks of the wage-earners. ”

“ A moderate amount of bodily work in addition to the mental work of school is not merely harmless, but is in most cases desirable. It is not wage-labour in and by itself which is harmful, but the conditions under which that labour is usually carried out. (This applies equally to the labour of women and of children.) The greed of employers, the deficient resisting powers of children, and the poverty of the children’s relatives, make child-labour dangerous in manifold ways for the bodily, mental, and moral health of the child. ”

“ The blows administered by society are inflicted on children whose poverty and neglected education are in most cases responsible for their faults. The victims, often emaciated by hunger, and trembling with shame or terror, can experience no spiritual emotion fit to be the basis of moral shame.
If the statistics of the life-history of those who are so disciplined were revealed, we should find that the majority come from, and return [Pg 329] to, a home where the mother, as a result of working out of the home, is hindered from caring for her children. ”

“ Among unskilled laborers, poverty and the large number of children often prevent the young from securing a helpful amount of education. The lack of wholesome and inexpensive recreation, and the existence of costly and injurious forms of entertainment, encourage unwise expenditure of savings, and, to that extent, may influence dependency. Child labor and the employment of mothers in industry prevent a normal family life, and may be intimately associated with illiteracy, low moral standards, and pauperism. ”

“ Through the employment of the labour of children, the total quantity of labour available for employment is increased. It is owing to this fact, and to the greater cheapness of their labour, that the employment of children in wage-labour helps to force down the wages of adults. It is through poverty as a rule that children are forced to adopt wage-labour. The earnings of the parents and of other adult members of the family are so small that the earnings of the children are absolutely indispensable, and constitute no inconsiderable addition to the family income. ”

“ The preceding analysis of industrial evolution, greed, necessity, and ignorance and indifference, narrows the field of causes to two. The average child laborer goes to work because his family needs the income, or because he "hates school." Often, both reasons are operating.
Family necessity is a prime cause of child labor. It is not, as many writers would lead us to believe, dire poverty which sends children to work. ”

“ In normal circumstances, in these cases relief is best afforded by means of the voluntary agencies of society. In abnormal circumstances, such as are caused by a widespread depression of industry, the evil may be met by a special effort on the part of the voluntary agencies or by municipalities or other bodies providing temporary relief-work.
In the second place, the underfeeding of the child may be due to the chronic and permanent poverty of the parent. The wages of the breadwinner even when in full work may be insufficient to afford adequate support for a numerous family. ”

“ Societies for the prevention of cruelty to children ought to intervene as readily when moral leprosy notoriously pervades the home of the rich as the State intervenes when children's health is neglected or their moral well-being endangered in a home of poverty. ”

“ Some of the most intelligent and devoted workers in child-saving agencies have sounded the note of warning on the subject of children wage-earners. "The fact," says Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, "that the world of industry has found out and established methods of labor which can utilize the work of children to profit, gives to that world of industry, as an upper and a nether millstone, the greed {82} of employers and the cupidity and poverty of parents, between which the life of the child is often ground to powder." ”

“ It is certainly true that any aid given to the child will tend meanwhile to keep the wages at bare subsistence rates. It is also true that the distribution of relief only tends to make the poor comfortable in their poverty, instead of helping them to rise out of it. All this and much more might be urged against the demand to institute and organise the systematic public feeding of school children. ”

“ It is her poverty that compels her to use his services. But the risks to the boys outweigh all advantages. The poverty that compels a mother to subject her child to such risks ought to be relieved; the public and the newspaper proprietors would find other means of obtaining and delivering the news if they realised the cost of the present condition of things; and a nursery of criminals would be removed.
In most cases the parents require more attention than the boys, and especially the female parent. The children are her peculiar care, and if she takes to drink the results to them are serious. ”

“ All the statistics available prove that vice and crime are far more common among the children of immigrants than [Pg 224] among the children of native parentage, and this is due no less to the yardless tenement and street playground than to widespread poverty. In a mass of cases the father and mother both work in that feverish, restless way of the new arrival, ambitious to get ahead. To overcome poverty they must neglect their children. Turned out of the small tenement into the street, the child learns the street. ”

“ They are largely produced by the conditions of the society into which children are born, and by which they are moulded. Ten years of squalor or degrading conditions may deteriorate or ruin the nature of the child. My attention was once called to a bright and charming little girl, brought to a public institution by a poor mother fallen into sickness and poverty. ”

“ Upon investigation of the home conditions of several hundred newsboys in New York City it was declared that "in the majority of cases parents are not dependent on the boys' earnings. The poverty plea—that boys must sell papers to help widowed mothers or disabled fathers—is, for the most part, gross exaggeration." ”

“ Poverty forces children to adopt a course of action which may enable them to satisfy their immediate and most pressing needs. About half of the girls who go wrong become prostitutes; about half of the boys in similar case become thieves. ”

“ Chief of these are a reasonable amount of good, nourishing food and a healthy home. Deprived of these, physical or mental development must necessarily be hindered. And poverty means just that to the child. ”

“ This is where the children of honest poverty have the most precious of all advantages over those of wealth. The mother, nurse, cook, governess, teacher, saint, all in one; the father, exemplar, guide, counselor, and friend! Thus were my brother and I brought up. What has the child of millionaire or nobleman that counts compared to such a heritage? ”

“ That is a very different thing from the institution that, with its handsome buildings, its lawns, and its gravelled walks, looks to the poor parent like a grand boarding-school where his child can be kept, free of charge to him, and taught on terms that seem alluringly like the privileges enjoyed by the rich, until it shall be old enough to earn wages and help toward the family support; very different from the plan of sending the boy to the asylum to be managed, the moment parental authority fails at home. ”

“ In this country—the most favored beneath the bending skies—we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity... ”

“ The effects of this evil may often be traced in a large family of children, nearly all of whom show traces of the excesses of their parents. It commonly happens, too, that such large families are on the hands of poor men who cannot earn enough to give them sufficient food and comfortable clothing, with nothing whatever to provide for their education. The overburdened mother has her strength totally exhausted by the excessive demands upon her system incident to child-bearing, so that she is unable to give her children that culture and training which all children need. ”

“ Yet far too many children lack this essential foundation, and countless young people suffer the terrible effects of hunger, poverty, neglect, and abuse. Today's families are plagued with problems that hinder their ability to tend to their children's well-being. ”

“ The question seems to me to touch the social evil and the housing problem (as shown in Chapter IV of Miss Addams’ “A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil”) , the menace of child labor, of the sweat shops, and neglected childhood and starved motherhood on many sides. Why is a free chance to live and grow, for a child, any worse than free education? A child does not ask where things come from, at first. He only knows that he is cold, or hungry, or neglected. In the nature of the case he is dependent on someone. ”

“ It follows them into the institutions to which they are committed through its care, and fights their battles there, if need be, or the battles of their guardians under the law, against the greed of parents that would sacrifice the child’s prospects in life for the sake of the few pennies it could earn at home. And it generally wins the fight.
The Society has never received any financial support from the city, but has depended entirely upon private benevolence. Ample means have always been at its disposal. Last year it sheltered, fed, and clothed 1,697 children in its rooms. ”

“ Now do not imagine the case for the State being regarded as the Over-Parent, and for the financial support of parents is based simply upon the consideration of neglected, underfed, undereducated and poverty-blighted children. No doubt in every one of the great civilized countries of the world at the present time such children are to be counted by the hundred thousand—by the million ”

“ Here, as in medical prescriptions, it is futile to insist that a mother who is physically able shall nurse her baby if she is so poor that she must work under conditions that weaken her and thus reduce the grade and quality of her milk or that preclude leisure in which to nourish the infant. The question of poverty, that skeleton in every social closet, looms up here with an insistency that nothing will banish. No kind of philanthropy will solve the requirements of infant welfare when poverty or labor conditions are the root of the problem. ”

“ Unless we are prepared to maintain that the State is bound to care for the physical well-being of the young, but may let their minds lie fallow, we must surely admit that the case for compulsory education is as strong as for poor-relief to orphans and the children of destitute or vicious parents. In one respect it is, of course, incomparably stronger, for the percentage of parents who will allow a child to starve is undoubtedly much smaller than that of parents who will allow it to grow up wild or absorbed in mechanical drudgery. ”

“ Insufficient family income often means that children have to join in the daily quest for family subsistence or work outside the home, and this reduces their availability for learning and sometimes prompts them to leave school or live in the streets. ”

“ Is the problem equally simple when one faces the family kept above the line of malnutrition by the earnings of child workers? What steps can be taken to maintain the family at an adequate standard of living, and yet place before the children an opportunity for education? ”

“ It is as much a wrong to bring up children in an atmosphere of do-nothingism, as to refuse to have their teeth attended to or to have glasses fitted to weak eyes.
From the point of view of community welfare it is far more serious for the rich child to be brought up in idleness or without a purpose than for the poor child to become a public charge. Not only has society a right to expect more from rich children in return for the greater benefits they enjoy, but so long as rich children control the expenditure of money, they control also the health and happiness of other human beings. ”

“ Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to another generation that is so much worse to start off with.” She spoke of the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the children. ”