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While many may think of children’s rights violations occurring in the poor, war-torn countries of the world, children in the United States suffer from certain encroachments on their rights as well. The United States is the only nation in the world that has not ratified the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child, a document drafted in 1989 that serves to protect children’s rights through government action.

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Following the Civil War, the cotton mill industry, based partially on child labor, was responsible for raising many Southern white families out of poverty. These  mills almost exclusively employed white children because of an implicit agreement between the manufacturers and planters. This pact ensured that planters remained in control of the rural black labor supply. Some early historians believed that the altruistic motive of helping the white children avoid idleness was the mill owner’s primary purpose in operating the mills. As one mill owner remarked, working 12-hour days, 6 days a week left children “no time to spend on their free time” Later historian realized that the profit motive was the owner’s primary driver. Regardless of their goal, mill owners saw children as a primary requirement to operating a successful mill. For example, prominent South Carolina mill owner Lewis W. Parker described the rationale for the use of child labor in the mill.

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Seldom were questions raised about the right of the father to benefit from the labors of his offspring. This practice was simply seen as one of the natural privileges of parenthood. The perceived value of the child can be viewed through how the legal system treated the wrongful death of a child and the damages the parents could hope to recover. Courts of that period usually found that the proper amount due was “the probable value of the services of the deceased from the time of his death to the time he would have attained his majority, less the expense of his maintenance during the same time.

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Although children in the post‒Civil War United States labored in a variety of occupations, the legal foundation that allowed parental control was not controlled, regardless of the field of employment. The right of parents to take advantage of the productive capacity of their children was long recognized both in the United States and abroad. William Blackstone, an 18th-century English jurist, noted that a child is the property of his father. The toil of children during the Industrial Revolution was consistent with this belief

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United States took many years to outlaw child labor. By 1899, 28 states had passed laws regulating child labor. Many efforts were made to pass a national child labor law. The U.S. Congress passed two laws, in 1918 and 1922, but the Supreme Court declared both unconstitutional. In 1924, Congress proposed a constitutional to stop child labor, but the states did not refused it. Then, in 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. It fixed minimum ages of 16 for work during school hours, 14 for certain jobs after school, and 18 for dangerous work. Today all the states and the U.S. government have laws regulating child labor. These laws have cured the worst evils of children working in factories.