Children's Work, Schooling, and Welfare in Latin America

"From the 1980s through the 1990s, children in many areas of the world benefited from new opportunities to attend school, but they also faced new demands to support their families because of continuing and, for many, worsening poverty. Children's Work, Schooling, and Welfare in Latin America is a comparative study of children, ages 12-17, in three different Latin American societies. Using nationally representative household surveys from Chile, Peru, and Mexico, and repeatedly over different survey years, David Post documents tendencies for children to become economically active, to remain in school, or to do both. The survey data analyzed illustrates the roles of family and regional poverty, and parental resources, in determining what children did with their time in each country. However, rather than treat children's activities merely as demographic phenomena, or in isolation of the policy environment, Post also scrutinizes the international differences in education policies, labor law, welfare spending, and mobilization for children's rights. Children's Work shows that child labor will not vanish of its own accord nor follow a uniform path even within a common geographic region. A