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NOTE FROM JONAH: This is the continuation of a photo series from India. If you’re just joining us, here’s what you’ve missed:

1. I’m not alone here
2. People ‘like’ my diarrhea
3. Dancing In(dia) the Streets
4. Indian trains: Contemptibly cozy, crammed and claustrophobic
5. Feeding a City Part II: From Macro to Micro
6. Confusing realities of child labor
7. Enlightined in Bodh Gaya बोधगया

On child labor — its very hard for me to find a good moral compass. Its easy to take the Western perspective and say — kids should never work. However, in the developing world (especially in rural areas) this is simply not a reality — and in many cases working children are even more protected than those who do not work.

Parents depend on children to farm or earn money in whatever way they can. In many parts of the world children are brought into the world specifically to create another set of arms to help. They are financial assets to families. After visiting different women’s empowerment groups in India, I’ve heard lots of horror stories about Western organizations coming in and stopping children from working.

In some cases — if you take the children out of the workplace, you are taking away their value to the family. If they have no financial value to parents, children can be sold into prostitution. The choice between a child working to help the family or being a prostitute seems pretty clear.

While a lot of children do go to school — the end goal is not clear. Parents I’ve talked to clearly see (at least some) value in education; however, they have more pressing issues. Food, shelter, clean water and health care being some of the big ones.

After school, options are extremely limited for children in the developing world.

I’ve visited some rural villages in India where there is absolutely zero commerce in the village. There are no stores, no factories and almost no exportable industry. So if you decide to send your child to school eventually they will get to a point where you can finish or continue to a higher point in education (this higher point might be the 9th grade as university might be completely out of the question for financial reasons).

So let’s say a student finishes the 8th grade and this student comes from a poor family (which would be the vast majority of Indian families). Their options might be:

• 1) Continue on to high school — but after high school you will be left with the same options below but will have spent years learning when you could have been helping your family earn money to survive.
• 2) Leave your home and find work in a bigger city (like many migrant workers in China and India) and send money back to your family.
• 3) Stay home and help with family affairs and business — this might be farming or creating sellable goods. It might be helping to raise other children. It might be having children of their own.
• 4) Join the enormous unemployed work force of India (around 10%).

If you have a 14-year-old son, is it better for him to help work to feed the family or to go to school? The choice in some ways comes down to survival vs education.

If you chose survival over education you forfeit the chance of this specific generation helping to improve the life of the family down the line. If you chose education, you have no guarantee this will help your family now or down the line.

For many families — education is not even an option.

One big distinction comes in forced labor and factory work. This line is a little easier to draw. While I might not have a problem with a child helping to weave a basket at home that the family can sell – I do have a problem with a factory full of children making shoes.

In India the legal working age is 14-years-old. Some of the images above show young girls working — they may or may not be of legal working age. However, I think the age is almost irrelevant and the attitude people in the West should take in development work should be to encourage education while the kids are working. If kids can go to school for at least half the day and work for the other half of the day — they will have a chance to improve conditions down the road while simultaneously helping the families current realities. If you take the opportunity for them to work away — you open flood doors to lots of other problems.

While I believe child labor is wrong — when you see the needs of a village and their reality it makes it hard to make an absolute judgement on this — as we have done in the West. This isn’t to say I am “for child labor” but if you are going to work with the developing world you have to work with their reality — NOT our value system.