Box 3
Children as contributors to family income

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It is obvious that the gainfully occupied children bear a considerable share of the burden of supporting their families.^{Note 1}

The 1901 Census offers a glimpse of the labour force participation of older children at the time. Families, sometimes a result of economic pressures but also for other reasons, often sent their teenage children into the paid workforce. Census enumerators described a hierarchy of occupation in which ‘boy’ and ’girl’ helpers were at the bottom in terms of both age and earnings; especially teenage girls.^{Note 2} Some of these children resided in their employer’s home: among the responses to the question, “relationship to head” in the 1901 Census were ’servant girl’, ’hired boy’ and ’domestic chore girl’.^{Note 3}

Along with the introduction of compulsory schooling laws for children, Canada’s provinces began implementing child labour legislation at the beginning of the 20th century. Legislation included restrictions on the age at which a child could begin to work in certain industries, as well as the number of hours and what times of day children could work.

At the depth of the Great Depression, 1931 Census results show that children’s earnings were important to the economic security of many families. Children aged 15 and over in families earned 11.8% of all family earnings, and 8.6% of the total earnings of all wage earners.^{Note 4} The relative contributions of children towards family income varied greatly according to the socioeconomic position of the household head. For instance, among families in which the household head had low earnings, children contributed earnings that were on average 40.4% of those of the household head. In comparison, this proportion was 1.0% among the children of household heads in the highest earnings category.^{Note 5}

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Notes

1. Pelletier, A.J., F.D. Thompson and A. Rochon. 1938. The Canadian Family, 1931 Census, monograph no. 7, Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 98-1931CM-7, page 118.
2. Sager, E.W. 2007. “Inequality, Earnings and the Canadian Working Class in 1901”,  Household Counts: Canadian Households and Families in 1901, editors E.W. Sager and P. Baskerville, University of Toronto Press, pages 339 to 370.
3. The Canadian Families Project. 2002. The National Sample of the 1901 Census of Canada: User’s Guide.
4. Pelletier et al. 1938, Table LXXXIX.
5. Pelletier et al. 1938, Table XCV.