Paper Example on Street and Working Children

Street and working children have been in the world since the growth of urbanization. However, in the last decade, the number of street and working children has increased significantly. In his article children in the developing world Lewis Aptekar acknowledges that children have grown in developing countries. He focuses on the conditions these children face in the streets, their behavior and reasons they are on the streets. The details about the family structure of street children and the reason for why street children are treated with violence. He carries out methodological research on problems that include childrens ability to distort information, the researchers proclivity to under or overestimate the childrens emotional condition, distortions of facts created by the press and international organizations and general cross-cultural research.

Aptekar notes that there is no precise definition of street children; he says that it cannot be viewed that all street children are homeless. The great majorities of these children on the streets in various developing countries work on the streets, but live at home and are working to earn money for their families. U.NICEF said there were 40-50 million children on the streets in Latin America. These numbers would mean that more than 45 percent of all children in Latin America are street children. The numbers do not take into account the differences between working children living at home and street children who work in the streets and do not have parents.

Aptekar categorizes these children found in the street into four categories. First, there are the poor working children who return to their families at night. They are likely to attend school but are not smart and have poor conversation skills. Second is the independent street workers who work on the streets, and their family ties are breaking, and school attendance is decreasing and the delinquency increasing. Third, there are children of street families who live and work in the streets. In this category of the children are on the roads because of extreme poverty. Lastly, there are the children who have broken ties with their families. They reside in the streets full time and are what most people refer to as the real children of the road.

In the streets, the children have learned to survive in their way. Aptekar notes that they have developed an extraordinary capacity to tell stories. They lie about their ages, family background, the reasons they are on the streets and their current circumstances are included in their well-plotted stories. The children know presenting information about themselves as part of their survival skills which rests on their ability to manipulate their audiences. During his research, one boy tells Aptekar that he is in a state reformer because he father used to abuse him and later the same day told a female investigator he was there because the abandoned him and he had no other place to go.

Aptekar discusses the phenomenon of the street, in particular, their culture which is difficult to ascertain. He notices that in some countries of Latin America Street children have been around for more than a generation. These are neighboring countries with same qualities, and all around the world, the situation is the same. The number of street children in these countries varies but is almost the same. The idea that some cultural groups are over or underrepresented in the population of street children is difficult to accept, Cuba, for example, has few street children but a strongly African culture. Bolivia has a strong indigenous culture and few street children.

In conclusions, he notes that street children are street boys. They come from families headed mainly by women who teach them to be independent at an early age. They are allowed to be on the streets only in the poor urban areas of capitalistic and non-dictatorial governments in the developing world. In these places, they learn to find a niche in the economy of the poor and the participants as a countrys citizen by earning a living being family members and making judgments about what is correct and what is wrong at a young age. If they happen to challenge the roles assigned to them or of the etiquette of public places they are likely to become victims of physical violence.

The press as well as the international and national organizations that exist to provide for the children exaggerates their numbers and degree of their emotional problems. Misrepresentations can come from identifying the childrens obvious sense of freedom. This is not to say that these groups do not provide help for the children.

Works Cited

BIBLIOGRAPHY L., Aptekar. "Street in the Developing World." A review of their condition (1992).

www.sjsu.edu/laptekar/crossculturalresearch. (n.d.).