▶ 5 Year-old Chinese Boy Operating a Tractor / Payloader Like a Professional – YouTube.
I wasn’t much older than this boy when I learned the very same trade. I’ll always be grateful for the lessons and skills my dad and older brothers taught me during the heyday of Foster & Sons Excavating and Crane Rental in Muncie, IN back in the 60s.
This was how I spent my summer vacations, outside every day doing a man’s work, learning to relate to adults, earning money (which of course I spent on guitars), and learning to take pride in the fruits of my labors. Even though I wound up not going into the business, knowing how to handle heavy equipment has served me well several times over the years. And developing a bit of a work ethic helps every day you draw breath.
Child labor laws, while well-intentioned and sometimes a good thing, are not the indisputable gift to humanity they are purported to be. Often they hinder the growth and maturity of a youngster, keeping them dependent and ineffectual, in extreme cases well into adulthood. We see the results of this perpetual “juvenilization” of the young every day — kids with little or no emotional control, depressed ambition, obsessive/compulsive disorders, difficulties with attention, just plain laziness and a desire to be coddled and taken care of with no effort on their part to uplift themselves, etc etc.
Abusive exploitation is one thing, and shouldn’t happen. But arbitrarily cutting off a proven avenue to personal growth for generations of young people is quite another… and also shouldn’t happen. When will we learn to not throw the baby out with the bathwater?
