For my reading this week I chose Working Children in Contemporary Chinatown. It addressed the issue of immigrant children being required to work to help support the family. The young boy (age 11) in the article worked 20 hours a week while going to school. This was a fairly common occurrence and when he was sent to school at this age because of being an immigrant he was learning a new language and also years behind kids his own age. His family worked off their debt and after that he was able to just focus on school. Unfortunately others weren’t so lucky and ended up dropping out before they made it very far. When I was in high school I worked between 8 to 10 hours a week mostly on the weekend and I thought that was too much sometimes. But here this boy is and at 11 years old he is not only going to school and trying to catch up but he’s also working 20 hours a week. The children who were lucky enough to escape this made it quite far in the educational system.

The other story I read was Children in Wartime. It was about the questions parents had regarding their children. Mostly it was concern over a child’s “obsession” about the war. Experts said that children handle most events like this just fine and the play war games to work out their anxiety’s about it since they don’t sit down like adults do and talk about it.