The fact that around 40 percent of the miners are children is awful. The miners who were adults would not do anything because all this work was so they could help their families survive. 19 percent said they had seen a child die on an artisanal mining site. 87 percent experienced body pain, and many had been injured. 67 percent reported frequent or persistent coughing.
Young children could be hired to do the same jobs as adults for much less pay and could often fit into places adults couldn't. Parish apprentices were the most exploited type of child worker (Dunlop, 1912). These were children, who were either orphans or abandoned by their parents, that were under the care of local parishes. Mill owners bought the children from the parishes for the purpose of labor. The mill owners housed and fed the children in lieu of pay.
Examine the ways in which childhood can be said to be socially constructed. (24 marks) Some sociologists see childhood as socially constructed, which means that it is something created and defined by society. They argue that the positions children occupy in society are not fixed, but differ with regards to cultures, places and times. It is generally accepted today that children are different from adults. There is a belief that children’s lack of knowledge, experience and skills call for them to be nurtured and socialised for a protected time before they are ready for adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it.
One of the main reasons why people who have a learning disability live in poverty is that they are excluded from the labour market, as a direct consequence of this; they are mostly dependent on benefits. In its report "The same as you? A review of services for people with learning disabilities", the Scottish Executive acknowledges, "93% of people attending day centres do not have paid work and only 20% of activity in day centres takes the form of education and employment". (www.scotland.gov). It is common for a person to attend a training centre or community college for years only to receive a certificate for attending the course.
Urie Bronfenbrenner is generally regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in the field of developmental psychology (Vander Zanden, Crandell & Crandell 2007). His Ecological Systems Theory holds that development reflects the influence of several environmental systems, and it identifies five environmental systems: Micro system: The setting in which the individual lives. These contexts include the person's family, peers, school, and neighborhood. It is in the micro system that the most direct interactions with social agents take place; with parents, peers, and teachers, for example. The individual is not a passive recipient of experiences in these settings, but someone who helps to construct the settings.
Aries’s work has been criticized because of material he used to develop his ideas. Martin Shipman thinks he uses historical evidence such as paintings and documentary sources are unreliable. However, there are some researchers who support Aries’s work. Lawrence Stone suggest that most poor families would have houses consisting of just one large room. In this type of environment children were continuously exposed to the adult world.
The poor children living in the harsh conditions in Africa and any other children with similar circumstances. Those types of poor children live lives that are much worse than most of the stressed adults in North America. There are millions of children who are six years old and they have the responsibility to take of not only themselves, but their siblings as well. If that wasn't harsh enough, they have little to no access to the supplies they desperately need. They have nobody to look after them.
To what extent is childhood a social construct? Social construct = a socially created aspect of life. Social constructionalists argue that human beings actively and creatively produce society. Childhood is an example of a social construct as it is not a natural or a biological state therefore being socially constructed. The understanding of children is that they are not the same everywhere and they are different from adults, how they are different, and the expectations placed on them differ depending on the society they live in.
In society today poverty is measured to ways either absolute poverty, or relative poverty. Lets start with Absolute poverty, Absolute poverty measures the number of people living below a certain income threshold or the number of households unable to afford certain basic goods and services like food water and shelter. This is the level of poverty you most likely picture when you hear the word poverty. Usually commercials of foreign children, with bloated bellies who suffer from malnutrition and lack of clean water. Absolut poverty is mostly prevalent in developing countries like India or Haiti, but the United States is not immune from it.
Poverty effects our health in many ways including mental health and diseases, access to vaccinations, malnutrition, and attaining adequate healthcare. According to Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, one in seven people go hungry in the world everyday. That is 925 million people. Nearly 50,000 people, including 28,000 children, die everyday due to poverty-related problems and preventable disease in impoverished third-world countries. That doesn't include the other millions of people who are infected with AIDS and other incurable diseases.