Boys would be employed to scare the birds from the crops, guard the livestock from straying, pick hops, sow potatoes and beans, gather mushrooms and herd animals to market. They would also collect firewood, fill sacks with grain and shred turnips.
What work did Victorian children do?
Children worked on farms, in homes as servants, and in factories. Children provided a variety of skills and would do jobs that were as varied as needing to be small and work as a scavenger in a cotton mill to having to push heavy coal trucks along tunnels in coal mines.
What did rich Victorians children do?
Rich Victorian children would have gone to school, or been taught at home, and they would have had lots of time to play. You might recognise some of the toys Victorian children played with and you might even have your own versions! Rich Victorian children usually had a variety of wooden or metal toys to play with.
What was life like for Victorian children?
Victorian children did not have as many toys and clothes as children do today and many of them were homemade. What work did Victorian children do? In the 1850s one in nine girls over the age of 10 worked as domestic servants for wealthy homes. Poor children often had to work instead of going to school.
What did Victorian children do in their spare time?
They still had plenty of ways to amuse themselves though. Most towns like Huddersfield had theatres and music halls, and many of the local churches held social events. Sports were popular – rugby, football, cycling – and the growth of the train network meant that it was much easier for people to travel.
What jobs did children do on farms?
Children have always been involved in the work – helping with farm animals and their care; milking, cleaning stables and feeding would fall into this categories. Collecting water from the wells, sowing and collecting crops and scaring birds from the fields would also be examples of child labour.
What jobs did children do in the mine?
The older children and women were employed as hurriers, pulling and pushing tubs full of coal along roadways from the coal face to the pit-bottom. The younger children worked in pairs, one as a hurrier, the other as a thruster, but the older children and women worked alone.
What age did Victorian children start work?
Research has shown that the average age at which children started work in early 19th-century Britain was 10 years old, but that this varied widely between regions. In industrial areas, children started work on average at eight and a half years old.
What rights did Victorian children have?
With no laws to protect children, this meant they had few rights and were badly treated. Seen as simply the property of their parents, many children were abandoned, abused and even bought and sold. Thought to be born evil, children needed to be corrected, punished and made to become good citizens.
What jobs did children do in the 1800s?
In cities and towns, children would typically have to work in factories or mills. In more rural areas, farm work was more common. Children would sometimes be employed to scare birds away from crops.
How many hours did Victorian children work?
Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious conditions, as their elders did. Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day had been passed as early as 1802 and 1819.
What did rich Victorian children wear?
Children tended to wear miniature versions of adult clothes. Boys wore dresses until they were about five years old. Once of school age they wore suits or short trousers and jackets with a cap. Sailor suits were also fashionable.
What did rich Victorian girls do?
More specifically, it was a rich, upper-class, man’s world, and even better if you had land, a large house, a title, and a doting wife. Women of this class enjoyed a life full of all the things money could buy; travel, fine clothes, good food and of course, servants and staff to do chores for them.
What was it like for children working in factories?
Children worked long hours and sometimes had to carry out some dangerous jobs working in factories. In textile mills children were made to clean machines while the machines were kept running, and there were many accidents. Many children lost fingers in the machinery and some were killed, crushed by the huge machines.
Why did children work on farms?
As industrialization moved workers from farms and home workshops into urban areas and factory work, children were often preferred, because factory owners viewed them as more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike.
What did the farmers sons do?
The sons worked hard on the land and lived happily ever after. But the crops began to grow in the soil that they had dug. They sold the crops and made a lot of money. Hard work brings its own reward.
What types of work did children perform?
Young lads in urban areas often earned their living as newspaper carriers or as couriers. In many towns, mills and glass factories regularly employed girls and boys. Young children worked in the fields performing farm labor and on the coasts in the seafood industry.
What did child peasants do?
The peasants were called the lord’s “villeins”, which was like a servant. The peasants worked hard all year long. They grew crops such as barley, wheat, and oats. They also had gardens where they grew vegetables and fruits.
How much money did child laborers make?
Children in the mills usually worked eleven or twelve hour days, 5-6 days a week. Windows were usually kept closed because moisture and heat helped keep the cotton from breaking. Crushed and broken fingers were common in the coal mines. Most children working here were boys earning $0.50-$0.60 a day.
Do kids still work in mines?
Small-scale mining in the DRC involves people of all ages, including children, obligated to work under harsh conditions. Of the 255,000 Congolese mining for cobalt, 40,000 are children, some as young as six years.
When was child labor banned?
Quick links. The federal child labor provisions, authorized by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), also known as the child labor laws, were enacted to ensure that when young people work, the work is safe and does not jeopardize their health, well-being or educational opportunities.