I definitely broke the law in Michigan routinely. At the time the law was that of you were under 18 then during the school year you couldn’t work more than 30 hrs/wk. (I assume there must be an exception for dropouts or sometime, but I don’t know). Anyway my boss would pay me cash if I went over the limit. Mutually beneficial, no doubt. Of course I wasn’t working to support my family. I was working because I liked the money and even more I liked the sense of belonging I could get in a restaurant kitchen that I couldn’t get at school. Nothing ever boosted my confidence as a person more than when my boss started trusting me with the keys to the place at age 16. So no doubt that I think work is invaluable for adolescents to learn to grow up. I also think the law should have more flexibility. If I weren’t working it’s not as if I would have been studying. But all that said it was a choice, but a necessity. I’m glad we live in a society where kids aren’t forced to work because their families are in dire need (certainly this exists some places…just not writ large in the developed world). Totally agree though that we need to be careful about the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. Kids are resilient, and I think they actually thrive on responsibility. My kids are younger than yours, but even at 3 and 4 you can see that they love helping put the dishes away or working on home projects. They might suck at it and cause more trouble than it’s worth, but accomplishing a complex task and then getting a high five for it is what they live for. Maybe, and I’m just thinking out loud here, that’s part of my original point, that we live in the digital coal-choked slums. We’ve “protected” kids to the point that all they have left is the iPad. Companies fought for eyeballs, because they know where the eyeballs are to be found. I don’t know if we’ll ever make social media illegal for kids, but I think we’ll approach a day when it’s entirely frowned upon, and hopefully the business models will collapse or change drastically. Legal or not, society shouldn’t be set up to push our kids toward screen addiction from a young age. Just late night ramblings here, so apologies of there are a lot of non sequiturs.
There's an assumption (backed by propaganda and revisionist history) that history has been one long steady arc towards progress when in fact (1) nobody focuses on anything but western European history (2) it's had fucktons of fits'n'starts. "labor" vs. "child labor" became a thing in the Victorian era because pastoralism and artisanism were wiped out by enclosure and mass-production. The Luddites weren't complaining about technology, they were complaining about wealth concentration and the unchecked evolution of Victorian squalor. That's what prompted Communism - Engels wandered over to the UK and went "whoa holy shit industrializaiton and capitalism are a massive step back for ordinary people" and Marx went "seize the means of production" which is a meaningless concept in a preindustrial society. But because we've been at the foremost of industrial society from the get-go, we naturally presume it is an unalloyed good and matchstick girls would have died of cholera even if they weren't drinking their own shit in Whitechapel. Computers and devices are an environmental hazard, one we're adapting rapidly to either deal with or be defeated by. Social media is 20 years old and has radically changed politics and society but I mean, high schools are 100 years old and radically changed politics and society. Fundamentally? If you're a bad parent, you're a bad parent. The challenges change but the need to respond to them doesn't. That "we" has always fucked up their kids, parents have always rebelled against the "we." The "child labor laws" thing is a total non sequitur. I was ten hours a week at a toy store from 4th grade, got social security statements and everything. You can have child actors on stage for anywhere from half an hour (newborns) to 4 hours per day (teenagers) no problem. they can't work full shifts until 16 which... c'mon. Okay, they can't manufacture explosives. But I mean, c'mon. I have an uninterrupted social security history going back to age eight. That doesn't include paper routes, mown lawns, short-order cooking at the ski area or fixing cars. And none of the regulations have changed from when I was a kid.