We know that a trend sweeping the country is the trend of getting rid of child labor protections, lowering age limits, increasing allowable hours, and opening up dangerous workplaces to teen laborers, because it's important to protect children from seeing drag queens, but not from working in a meatpacking plant or working long hours on a school night.
When I was in grad school I took an interesting course - "Adolescence". We learned about the history of adolescence which really wasn't a thing until the industrial revolution. Unless you were in the upper class, you were a child or an adult, with not much in between. The idea of adolescence was partly in response to high unemployment. The idea was that people in their teens were taking jobs from married men that needed to support a family. Keeping kids out of the workforce and requiring them to go to school made more economic sense. We were also learning more about human growth and development at that time and workers rights became aligned with children's rights and safety. Fast forward - We now are in a time of historically low unemployment, and being real Americans, we would rather put adolescents back in the workforce than allow more immigrants who are willing to do the same work. Better yet, let's employ the undocumented kids who nobody cares about. But I do find it interesting that our definition of childhood waxes and wanes with the economy.
When I was in grad school I took an interesting course - "Adolescence". We learned about the history of adolescence which really wasn't a thing until the industrial revolution. Unless you were in the upper class, you were a child or an adult, with not much in between. The idea of adolescence was partly in response to high unemployment. The idea was that people in their teens were taking jobs from married men that needed to support a family. Keeping kids out of the workforce and requiring them to go to school made more economic sense. We were also learning more about human growth and development at that time and workers rights became aligned with children's rights and safety. Fast forward - We now are in a time of historically low unemployment, and being real Americans, we would rather put adolescents back in the workforce than allow more immigrants who are willing to do the same work. Better yet, let's employ the undocumented kids who nobody cares about. But I do find it interesting that our definition of childhood waxes and wanes with the economy.