Excerpt from Young Workers and Their Jobs in 1936: A Survey in Six StatesF amily background - The economic status of the family bore a close relation to the work of the children. Of the employed children under 16 years of age only 45 percent had a father who was employed and present in the family. In 31 percent of the cases the child's father was either dead or absent from home and in the remaining 24 percent he was present but was either unemployed or unemployable. The 16 and 17-year - old workers came from broken homes or homes with an unemployed father somewhat less often than the younger children. Of these older boys and girls, 57 percent had an employed father in the family and only 25 percent had no father at home.Adult unemployment was found to be a major factor in the children's employment. Of the children under 16 years of age, 36 percent came from families with at least one member 18 years of age or over who was totally unemployed. The corresponding figure for the older boys and girls was 30 percent.Age at leaving school. - The young workers under 16 had less school ing than those 16 and 17 years of age. All the working children who were under 16 at the time of interview had of course left school before they were 16, but not quite half the 16 and 17 -year - old workers had done so. Yet in every one of the States visited some boys and girls in the older as well as the younger group had left school before they were 14 years old. The proportion of the children leaving school before reaching 14 was very small in the New England and Middle Western States, only 3 percent and 8 percent, respectively, for the children under 16 years of age. But in the Southern States, 31 percent of the white children and 60 percent of the Negroes in the younger group had left school before they were 14. Several Southern children, white as well as Negro, reported that their schooling had stopped when they were not more than 10 years old.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.