The movement of the focus of production from farm to factory, decreased the interdependency of the family and offered individual members a greater number of occupational choices.
This was a change from how people believed that a home was a home with a working father and a stay at home mother that did all the housely duties
“The urban family. . . bears little resemblance to a rural family. On a family farm, children can make a direct economic contribution by doing chores and helping in many of the farm activities. … In the city only the wage-earner brings in money; children . . . become a financial burden who add nothing to the family income.”
Many working-class families, like their counter parts on the farm, depended on “the economy, industry and moderate wants of every member of the household,” including children, to meet the demands of city life
Children’s labor didn’t just stop in factories, they also performed important economic duties in their homes and on city streets to contribute to the family economy
Many contributed to their families in other ways rather than just bringing home an income
The men would go out and work first before they sent for the remaining families members
City’s emphasis on materialism, competition, standardization, and consumption constituted virtual culture shock for many recent arrivals
They employed both skilled and unskilled workers
In the winter, poor families had adequate water and sanitation facilities
In most working-class homes, children assumed domestic responsibilities before they reached the age of eight. Their first duties usually took the form of assisting in the daily upkeep of the home. At any hour of the day, youngsters could be found sweeping steps, washing windows, and scrubbing floors. In neighborhoods where dirt roads, animals, wood stoves, coal furnaces, and industrial pollution were common features, keeping a home even relatively clean and livable could require several hands and many hours of labor. In the absence of fathers whose work kept them away from home ten to fifteen hours per day, six days a week, busy mothers frequently called upon children to make minor repairs to poorly constructed houses
When the children in the house were too young to work it made the mothers go out of the house and take up employment outside of the house
Food processing and the textile industry created jobs for women
With women being out of the house, it put more responsibility on the children to keep the houses clean
Children’s duties around the house were divided up by sex. I.e. Girls babysat while boys did things outside of the home such as farm and garden
“To be young, a servant and a stranger was to be unusually vulnerable, powerless and alone”
In private homes and on public streets, children in late nineteenth-century urban Ontario routinely performed a variety of important economic duties that directly contributed to the successful functioning of the family or household economy. Youngsters not only assisted their families in this way, but in many cases provided valuable services to a demanding urban clientele. In working class neighborhoods, the widespread practice of child labor exposed the poverty and insecurity that plagued many families which could not rely on industrial wages alone to meet the demands of urban life. At the same time, the use of youngsters as regular or auxiliary workers denoted a family strategy that was both rational and flexible in its response to new and challenging circumstances. In the short term, working-class families could depend on children to add the last necessary ingredient to their formula for survival. In the long term, youngsters paid the price. The most significant of these costs lay in the area of education
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, most children in Ontario enjoyed free access to primary education. But this held little promise for youngsters whose economic responsibilities at home prevented regular attendance at school.
A Toronto School Board census of 1863 revealed that of 1,632 children between the ages of five and sixteen not registered to attend school, 263, or 16.1 per cent, regularly worked at home during the day. Only full-time employment appeared more frequently on the chart as an explanation for non attendance. This category contained 453 youngsters, or 27.7 per cent of the total. Of the remaining 7,876 registered students, only middle- and upper-class children posted a record of regular attendance.
Harvey Graff claims that for many children “the achievement of education brought no occupational rewards at all.”
Children who worked at home or on the street instead of attending school received little compensation in the form of job training.
Once free from the production oriented nature of farm life, the family could devote more time to social development and material consumption. Yet for many children from lower class families, work and home remained one, and the greater social and economic opportunities that allegedly accompanied urban life never materialized. Urban poverty forced many working-class households to apply the rural tradition of shared family responsibilities to meet the challenge of city life
