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Globalization and Children

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To what extent has globalization improved the lives of children and youth?
To say that globalization has affected the lives of children and youth around the world would be an understatement. But with the growth over the years from globalization, many pros and cons have come out of it. The forthcoming of globalization has done wonders to developed countries, but not so much for underdeveloped countries. This is why I stand on a thin line between if it has improved the lives plenty, or not quite enough.
Globalization has increased economic competition. With this producers try to provide goods and services of value at the lowest possible prices. To achieve such a goal, manufacturer’s hire youth and children. They force the youth and children to work in horrible conditions that are unsafe and threatening to their health. They take advantage of the children due to the fact that they talk themselves up, and the children and afraid to speak up for their rights. Most of these kids that are being used as cheap labor, will never have a chance to go to school to further their education and to be able to get higher paying and safer jobs. In accordance with the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, it recognizes that “the child [a person under 18 years of age], for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding, …and in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality, and solidarity.” If people want to follow this and give children and youth around the world a better place to grow up in, why are people forcing them into shops for money. Yes globalization has proven a great tool when it comes to trading with other countries, but what people don’t see is how their products are made.
The biggest factor that puts me on edge when it comes to improved lives of children and youth is the media. Media has done so much for us in today’s society that it’s kind of hard to say that it hasn’t improved the lives of children and youth, but many things it seems that it has worsened it. It has worsened it through the way they cover stories, to technology becoming so advanced that today’s children in developed countries are becoming lazier, and lazier and this is why we see the rate of child obesity increasing so drastically. Everything that these children could need is right at their fingertips; they don’t have to leave their bed to get what they need done. With technology advancing every day, these children and youth are becoming too dependent on their gadgets, that if their parents take them away, or they are broken, they don’t know what to do. They forget their childhood games, playing outside, and any face to face human connections seems strange to them. Now with the way media covers their stories, they get the information we as individuals would like to know, but instead of giving it to us at is happens they manipulate their story to make it seem more enticing and to lure more people in to watching and supporting their station
So to sum it up, globalization has to a small extent provided some improvement to lives of youth and children around the world, but there are too many cons to say that it has done a great deal. In developed countries it twists the mind of the children and youth by portraying news stories incorrectly, and to put it bluntly, making our kids fat due to the lack of exercise they are partaking in while sitting on their bums all day playing on tumblr, or facebook. Globalization in developing countries has only worsened their lives as well and it causes the youth and children to lose their childhoods by working their lives away in workshops to provide cheap and affordable clothes to people in places such as Canada, and the United States. In the end, I don’t believe that globalization has done much for this generation of youth and children, the only thing it has done is worsen the lives for most of these children.

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