Re: Encourage, don't ban child labour
"while their parents did the hard manual stuff and the more dangerous stuff (threshing corn with scythes etc.)."
Did "threshing corn with scythes" come from a YouTube video? Not so much dangerous as pointless; scythes were used to cut the corn in the field, not to thresh it afterwards.
</pedant>
I sometimes worked on a local farm during school holidays; teenage labour rather than "child", but not so long ago that scythes and manual threshing were needed; the combine harvester had been invented, although as often as not the cut grain was tied using a "binder" for threshing back at the farm using a rather antiquated threshing machine.
</nostalgia>