This thesis investigates three important themes within the development economics literature that link children, women and economic development. In the first essay we present an analysis of child labour among agricultural households in rural Nepal. We first examine the monetary contribution of child labour to family farms. For this purpose, within a non-separable agricultural household model we estimate a farm production function to obtain shadow wages for both children and adults employed on the farm. Our results reveal that the relative contribution of child labour to family income is not negligible. We then analyse child labour supply to explore whether it is driven by poverty or other reasons such as imperfections in the labour market. We estimate both a reduced form model and a structural equation model. This latter includes the estimated shadow wages and income from the previous analysis. Both models allow for an examination of how child labour supply reacts to a change in the opportunity cost of time and wealth. The reduced form results suggest that an increase in household's wealth (measured by land endowments) reduces child labour, specifically of girls. This result is consistent with the hypothesis of poverty-induced child labour in the presence of perfect labour markets. This decline, however, occurs for sufficiently high levels of wealth. Imperfections in the labour market may play a role in explaining child labour of boys and in households that are not at the top-end of the land distribution. Estimates of the structural labour supply model, however, yield results on wage and income elasticities that partly contradicts the theoretical predictions. In the second essay we analyse whether and how an increase in the participation of women in a key decision making body of local collective action institutions - the Executive Committee (EC) of Community Forest User Groups (CFUG) in Nepal - aspects forest protection, specifically household firewood collection. In many developing countries women are responsible for the collection and management of forest products essential to the daily lives of their household. Therefore they have stronger interests than men in ensuring the availability of these products. Despite this, women are often excluded from the decision-making process that sets out the rules to access and collect forest products within community forests. We account for the potential endogeneity of female participation and exploit an amendment made to the guidelines for CFUG formation that sets a higher threshold for women representation in the Executive Committee to evaluate the impact of women on firewood extraction. The results indicate that higher female participation in the ECs of CFUGs leads to a decrease in firewood extraction. This evidence is suggestive that women are prioritising conservation to ensure sustainable firewood extraction for their daily needs. In the third essay we analyse the short and long-term impact of violence on education in Timor Leste. Specifically, we examine the effect of the 1999 violence on school attendance in 2001 and its longer-term impact on primary school completion of the same cohorts of children observed again in 2007. We compare the educational impact of the 1999 violence with the impact of other periods of high-intensity violence during the 25 years of Indonesian occupation. The short-term effects of the conflict are mixed. In the longer term, we find evidence of a substantial loss of human capital among boys in Timor Leste exposed to peaks of violence during the 25-year long conflict. The evidence suggests that this result may be due to household trade-offs between education and economic welfare.

This study from the onset sought to explore, through a postcolonial critique, the meaning ascribed to child labour by fishers in a fishing community in Ghana. The purpose was to inform practice in social work so that social justice might be achieved for working children and their parents. However the study expanded, methodologically and theoretically, to preliminarily include a psychoanalytically informed psychosocial and discursive approach, extending the postcolonial critique to develop a nuanced understandings of the fishers' lived experience of, and responses to, children's work. Distinct from the dominant reductionist and positivistic etiologic understandings of child labour, this approach neither derides child labour as morally reprehensible and unequivocally dangerous, nor romanticises its beneficial aspects and links to cultural and traditional beliefs and practices (see Klocker, 2012). Instead, enables understanding of the fishers as ‘defended subjects' who invest in certain discourses as a way of defending against their vulnerable selves. It also affords a critically reflexive understanding of myself as a ‘defended researcher', owing to my semi-insider position as a former child labourer, and of the impact of this on my research relationships and findings. The study is intended to inform social worker practices in order to deal with complex situations concerning the relationship among fishers and their children paying equal attention both to the inner and the social circumstances of the fishers (Wilson, Ruch, Lymbery, & Cooper, 2011). In this regard it is inspired by Mel Gray's (2005) contention that social work practice should be shaped by the extent to which local social, political, economic, historical and cultural factors, as well as local voices, mould and shape social work responses. The study is conducted using critical ethnographic design that draws on the lived experiences of 24 fishers. Attempts were made to explore the fishers' experiences using psychoanalytically informed method (FANI) in addition to other conventional methods. The study highlights the fishers' use of narratives of slavery to explicate child labour. It focuses on the relationships that the fishers' have developed with their children and with the laws surrounding the use of children in work. It gives an indication of how the fishers' violently and aggressively relate with their working children. It also highlights the fishers' rejection of the laws surrounding child labour as being foreign and an imposition which excludes customary laws. The study further examines the identities the fishers developed in relation to laws that regulate them and children's work. It suggests that others see the fishers as powerless subjects who don't matter. It also underscores my shame and worries as a researcher considered by the fishers as an ‘educated elite' who works for ‘white people'. It further highlights how I provided self-justifying explications to defend myself as a researcher. The findings imply that solutions to child labour need to be localised paying equal attention to both the psyche and the social life of the fishers. They speak to the imperative for critical review of social workers/NGOs practices taking into account the unconscious processes that go on between fishers as parents and social workers as service providers. This thesis introduces a psychosocial dimension and insight into debates on child labour in Ghana.

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The overarching goal of this thesis was to compare the mother-child relationship and child behaviour across cultures. The three articles in this thesis were part of a multi-method investigation comparing England (an individualistic culture) and Turkey (a collectivistic culture). Accounts from two children and their mothers were obtained from 218 two-parent families in total. Mothers completed questionnaires, children were interviewed using the Berkeley Puppet Interview, and observations recorded during various play tasks. The study was unique as it recorded the perspectives of mothers and young children aged from 4 to 8 in each family across cultures. Results showed that English mothers used more positive methods of discipline with their older children, and reported less conflict with both of their children compared to Turkish mothers. In contrast, English children reported more anger and hostility from their mothers than did their Turkish peers (Paper 1). Cultural differences in maternal values partially explained these differences in positive discipline and anger and hostility (Paper 1). Using structural equation modelling, partial cross-cultural measurement invariance for parenting and child adjustment was revealed (Paper 2), and a stronger association between parenting and child adjustment was found for the English versus Turkish families (Paper 2). Finally, multi-level modelling yielded significant prediction of children's adjustment from both family-wide and child-specific aspects of parenting (Paper 3). The implications of the findings include appreciating different perspectives of parenting when conducting cross-cultural research (Paper 1); the culturally distinct meanings of both parent and child adjustment should be considered when interpreting their association (Paper 2); and that differential parenting within families can also have distinct cultural meaning (Paper 3). Future research would benefit from exploring within-and between-cultural differences in parent-child relationships further, across multiple countries, over time and in larger samples.