EFFECT OF CHILD LABOUR ON THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN ISOKO SOUTH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF DELTA STATE
ABSTRACT
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
A child is a person between the age of 18 months and l3 years. However, children are one of the major stages in a person’s development. At 18 months of age, children have just begun to outgrow baby cloths though many still wear diaper. By the age of 13, many boys and girls have nearly double height and quadrupled in weight. They have also began to develop sexually, they are thus looking more like young adult but growing and development. It also involves significant changes in child’s behaviour through processes, emotions and attitudes.
These psychological changes largely determine the kind of adult that child will become or will grow to be. Strictly speaking, children want to be loved, to be accepted, to succeed in life and to be noticed, children will use their enviable activities to secure the important things in their lives. A child’s psychological growth depends on the environment as well. The child’s environment consist of everything with which the child comes in regular and frequent constant with including other people, the majority of the children receive the environmental help they need for normal psychological development.
Childhood can be divided into four stages based on period of psychological changes. These stages are the toddler stage, the pre-school stage, the early school stage and the pre-teenage stage. The lack of care and love needed by the child and the absence of proper transition from one stage to another of childhood will go a long way in affecting the child physically, psychologically, mentally, emotionally and socially and moreover, one of the factors that affects or hinders proper transition of children from childhood to adult is child labour which hampers the child’s growth and development.
