Child Labour and their Physical Problems

Child labour indicates employment of child for economic wage earning work and the child is subjected to various hazards related to his mental, physical and social health. The child loses his "childhood" abruptly and is prematurely pushed to live an adult life and shoulder responsibilities. A summary by the ILO showed that, the world's 211 million working children aged from 5 to 14 were situated in the regions of the world, which is serious issue internationally.

Objective: To assess the knowledge and attitude on child labour among parents and to rule out the physical health problems of working children.

Methods: In order to achieve the objectives of the study, a non experimental research design with a descriptive approach was adopted. 80 parents of working children were interviewed using non probability purposive sampling technique.

Result: The result reveled that; majority (72.5%) of parents had moderately adequate knowledge on child labour. The mean score was 56.37 ± 11.61, parental attitude on child labour explains that, Majority (95%) of parents had positive attitude on child labour. The mean score was 70.26 ± 5.94 and identification of common health problems among working children shows that, Majority (92.5%) of children had moderate health problems which needs some medical intervention and (2.5%) of them had sever health problems which need urgent medical intervention. The mean score was 50.75 ± 5.36.

Findings of the study showed that there is a positive correlation between parental knowledge and attitude on child labour (r= 0.33, P<0.01). There is a low positive correlation between common health problems and parental knowledge (r=0.08) and also there is a low positive correlation between attitude and health problems (r=0.1). There was a significant association between the parental knowledge and Father's Education and there was a significant association between the parental attitude and age, monthly income of parents and other demographic variables like age, area of residence, habits, monthly income, and reason for child labour are not associated. There was no significant association between common health problems and demographic variables of working child.