Industrial Revolution Child Labor

We all know child labor as something that has died down and was around in the 1700s, all the way to the 2000s, it has mostly been stopped. But at the height of the industrial revolution child labor was at an all time high. At the time more than half the labour workers were children.
Child labour should not even be a thing, but because children on the street had nowhere else to go and the factories that picked them up would have fed them and clothed them they turned to working in the factories. In the factories however was a different story, the children workers had the worst jobs and very harsh punishments when they did something wrong. Since the workers were children though this allowed them to fit in places no other workers could making

So they turned to the children that were living on the streets. Of course they would jump at the occasion of getting clothed and fed but they had to do work in the cotton mills. It didn’t seem like that bad of a deal, of course anything would seem like a good deal to homeless children. In the cotton mills it was a different place and was dangerous as the machinery was not fenced off and had a lot of moving parts, if the children were to get too close to them then they would get their hands crushed or if their hair got caught up in it their scalps could get torn off. So you see why this was dangerous. By the 1780s almost all factories turned to child workers as they were low maintenance and could learn how to operate machinery quickly. These factories were employing children when they were only five or six years old. By the time of the steam engine a lot in the factories were changing, mostly the machines and how to operate them. So as you would expect the employers had gotten more children to do the jobs that required you to get in between the cracks and many more children lost their lived because of