States are increasingly considering and enacting laws that reduce protections for child laborers, and the number of minors who have been employed in violation of existing child labor laws has been steadily growing. We argue that politicians deploy the rhetoric of parental rights in today’s legislative battles over child labor protections to create political cover for reforms that benefit businesses, not children or their families. Part I demonstrates that appeals to parental rights have a long history in child labor law. Through much of the battle to regulate children’s labor, child-labor opponents insisted that regulations infringed parents’ legitimate rights over the care, custody, and control of their children. Nevertheless, over time, it became clear that children’s wellbeing was best served by a combination of state and federal labor protections that restricted children’s work hours and conditions. Part II turns to the recent attacks on child labor protections in the name of parental rights. This Part considers the political benefits to legislators in framing efforts to roll back labor protections in the name of parental rights, as well as how this rhetoric hides a range of less politically popular forces driving this rollback. It then demonstrates that elimination of existing labor protections for children risks both their current wellbeing and their future prospects. Doing so, we argue, withdraws the state from the critical role it has long played—and should continue to play—in protecting children from market forces. Part III concludes by considering ways to counter the new rhetoric of parental rights and its impact on child labor laws.
Cahn et al. (Mon,) studied this question.