Hundreds of thousands of children and teens work as hired farm laborers in the fields across the United States. Additionally, many of these children are undocumented and have parents who don’t think their kids will do good in school. Most of the kids that don’t get that opportunity to go to school end up working in the fields at a really young age. In many cases, teenagers drop out of school to work due to helping their parents. 

 And in some cases, teenagers start working in the fields because their parents force them. The reason their parents put them to work at a young age is that they don’t believe that school will help them out. Another reason parents don’t let their children go to school is that they don’t take school seriously. Their parents want a better life for their children and they want their children to realize that working in the fields is very hard. 

My parents took me to work in the summer of 2017 in the raspberry because I wasn’t doing good in school. My parents wanted me to learn my lesson about what farmworkers have to go through every single day. Working in the fields was not easy because I had to wake up at 5:00 am to make my lunch and to come out of the house at 5:30 am and go to work. In the morning it would be so cold that you can’t really feel your hands than in the afternoon it starts to get hot. The time we would come out was around 6 or 7 of the evening. 

Featured image Wikimedia Commons

Picture Credit Wikimedia Commons

Information Source National Farm Worker Ministry