Children who worked in factories during the Industrial Revolution were generally treated harshly, exploited for cheap labor, and exposed to dangerous and unhealthy conditions.

Long hours and low pay

  • Children often worked between 12 and 16 hours a day, sometimes starting as early as 5 a.m. and finishing late at night, with very few breaks.
  • Their wages were a fraction of an adult’s pay, sometimes as little as one-eighth of what adults earned for similar work, because employers saw them as cheap and easily replaceable labor.

Dangerous and unhealthy conditions

  • Many children worked around fast-moving machinery; jobs like scavenging under machines or piecing broken threads meant they could be scalped, crushed, maimed, or even killed if they slipped or fell asleep from exhaustion.
  • Factories were cramped, badly ventilated, dusty, and dirty, so children breathed in polluted air for hours, increasing the risk of lung and other diseases while often living in overcrowded, filthy factory housing.

Punishments and discipline

  • If children worked too slowly or made mistakes, they were commonly beaten with straps or hit by overseers to force them to go faster.
  • Some accounts describe even more extreme punishments, such as plunging exhausted children head-first into water cisterns to “wake them up” and keep them working.

Loss of childhood and education

  • Because of the long working day, children had little or no time for school, play, or rest, which meant they missed out on education and grew up illiterate or with very limited schooling.
  • Many were orphans or very poor children effectively bound to factory owners as “pauper apprentices,” tied to contracts that kept them working for years and leaving them with few choices.

Attempts at reform

  • Public concern about overwork, injuries, and abuse led to factory laws in the 1800s (such as the 1833 Factory Act in Britain) that tried to limit hours and set minimum ages for child workers.
  • Even so, enforcement was uneven, and in many smaller or remote factories, children continued to endure long hours, poor conditions, and strict discipline for a long time.

TL;DR: Children in factories were treated as cheap, easily controlled workers: they labored for extremely long hours in dangerous, unhealthy conditions, were often beaten or cruelly punished, and lost out on education and a normal childhood.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.