Can You Explain How Child Labor Affects Education?
When children are forced to work, it becomes apparent how child labor affects education. Because of child labor, a child’s ability to attend school is hindered or may become completely impossible. This may be due to long work hours or that school is prohibited by the employer. Some jobs are seasonal due to a crop’s harvesting schedule or another seasonal element, so children can attend school during the off-season. However, this is still problematic since laboring children fall behind their peers and miss important educational development during their seasonal work.
Education is essential.
- Education helps a child’s development.
- Children learn to process information, make decisions, communicate with their peers and develop other cognitive skills in school. Without regular and consistent educational opportunities, this development is hindered. Child labor also causes children to be overly tired, which impedes learning.
- When children attend school regularly, they have adults looking out for them and their safety.
- Teachers can protect them from traffickers and others who seek to harm them.
- Children with consistent educational opportunities have a far greater chance to break the cycle of poverty.
- Many children have never known anything but poverty. Their grandparents lived in poverty, their parents are poor, and they will be poor, too, unless that cycle is broken. Education gives them the opportunity they need to break the cycle.
- When children learn to read, write and do basic math, they learn valuable skills that will help them in adulthood.
- These skills help them gain better employment as adults. They obtain the skills necessary to begin their own businesses, understand contracts and negotiate. This makes them less likely to be taken advantage of.
GFA World provides an opportunity for children to participate in a child sponsorship program where they and their family receive practical assistance. Parents are incentivized to keep their children in school—a requirement of the program. The program provides essentials such as school supplies, nutritious food, health screenings, clean water, and educational opportunities. These benefits ease the parents’ financial burden and make it possible for kids to be kept out of child labor.
Consider how you can release children from child labor and give them the opportunity to learn and grow with their peers in an educational setting. Will you join us in this mission by becoming a child sponsor? Together, we can transform the lives of children in need, their families and their communities.
