Do poor people love their children less? In the case of child laborers, this seemingly straightforward question has generated a range of complex responses. This includes research within the value of children (VOC) framework with its tendency to pathologize parents by framing discussions on children’s labor within household-based economic decision-making. In a stark departure from this framework, this article, focused on India, foregrounds the key role played by post-independence development policies in naturalizing child labor. It offers the ‘politics of deferral’ as an alternate analytic to draw attention to both the incremental as well as the exclusionary logics that underlie the Indian state’s efforts to eradicate child labor through schooling. To what extent does a country like India – where state policies have largely failed to substantively separate children from labor – compel us to realign the current depoliticized, ahistorical and binary (between the economic and the sentimental) framing of children’s value privileged within VOC demographic research?

穷人爱他们的孩子少吗？对于童工，这个看似简单的问题已经产生了一系列复杂的反应。这包括在儿童价值（VOC）框架内进行的研究，该框架倾向于通过在基于家庭的经济决策中对儿童的劳动进行讨论来使父母感到不适。与该框架截然不同的是，本文的重点是印度，重点介绍了独立后发展政策在使童工归化中所起的关键作用。它提供了“递延政治”作为替代分析，以提请注意印度国家为通过教育消除童工所做的努力的增量逻辑和排斥逻辑。