Built on Small Backs: How Child Labour Left Its Mark on Dutch Skeletons

Throughout history, people have had it tough, some more than others. While in history we often talk about adults suffering, children suffered too. Among the most famous examples is the child labor force employed in factories during the Industrial Revolution. Old black and white images, grainy film, and grim documentaries show young, dirty, poor, and tired children. But what these images and documentaries don’t show is what was happening beneath the skin, to the very bones of these individuals.

In a recent study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology, PhD student Alex Tutwiler and Dr Rachel Schats examined the skeletons of 143 children and young adults (3 to 27 years old) from three Dutch archaeological sites dating to 1650 to 1850.

What they found was the grim reality of child labor, with children of all ages showing evidence of spinal damage. Interestingly, children working in the dairy industry in rural Netherlands showed greater spinal damage than those working in urban factories. Let's find out why and just what toll these labors had on the backs of these children,

The Grimm Realities of Child Labor

After the medieval period, child labor became increasingly common as Europe industrialized. In the Netherlands, it grew rapidly as the textile industry expanded from the late 1500s; by the early 1600s, children worked in most communities, with sectors such as textile manufacturing, dairy, and tobacco processing particularly reliant on them.

According to the 1849 census, children made up nearly 5% of the overall registered Dutch workforce, with over 15.6% under the age of 12. According to historical accounts, children generally began working around age 7, though this age could vary, and in Moordrecht, children as young as 4 worked 15-hour days in a rope factory. Meanwhile, children in the agricultural sector typically began working around age 6.

Despite the extensive records of Dutch child labor, little is known about how it affected their wellbeing and skeletal health. Such research is fairly limited in general. In Peru, a study found joint wear in children's arms and legs, while another study in England found spine-related damage, including arthritis and small fractures, in children. Another study indicated that social class and occupation shaped the patterns of spinal damage observed in post-medieval Dutch children.

The study by Tutwiler builds on this work by comparing the rates and patterns of spinal joint damage across three Dutch communities, including a rural dairy-farming community (Middenbeemster), an urban industrial community (Arnhem), and a non-working affluent urban community (Delft).

Types of Labor

According to historical records, the types of labor these children would have performed were pretty grueling, even for a full-grown adult. In the rural agricultural community, children began working from age 6, planting, weeding, raking, and caring for the animals. In dairy farming, children as young as 9 were expected to make cheese and milk cows. As they grew older, the roles became more gendered; boys moved manure and plowed while girls did household chores, or became servants elsewhere.

The skeletal records provide evidence of this division, Tutwiler said, “We found that archival males had significantly higher rates of spinal lesions, particularly on the vertebral bodies, which corresponds with the historical data.”

According to the 1849 census, 27,200 children under 16 worked in agriculture; that’s about 5% of the agricultural workforce- and it's likely an underestimation given that farmers' children were less likely to be recorded consistently in records to begin with.

In terms of industrial child labor, numbers grew steadily from the 1500s onwards; by the 1800s, over a quarter of Tilburg's workforce was children under 18, and roughly a third of registered workers on poor relief in Zwolle and Delft were children. Most began factory work at 9, but some started earlier. The average day lasted 12 hours, though despite municipal efforts, children sometimes logged as many as 17 hours a day in textile mills. There they would reel, spin, knit, and weave.

Whether they were hauling buckets of milk or sitting at a loom for 17 hours, children's bodies are still developing; they are weaker, and this left its mark.

Built on the Backs of Children

To determine the extent of this damage, the researchers combined skeletal analysis with historical and clinical evidence. In total, 143 individuals were examined.

Among the types of damage they were on the lookout for were facet joint osteoarthritis (FJOA), a wear-and-tear damage to small joints that connect the spinal bones.

Schmorl’s nodes, which are small dents in the spinal bones caused by the soft cushioning discs between the bones getting pushed out (imagine putting too much pressure on a stress ball and having a bubble of goop popping out the side), and body margin modifications, which are changes to the edges of the vertebrae like wearing down or extra bone growth.

The results, according to Tutwiler, were heartbreaking. It’s one thing to read accounts of child labor, another completely to actually see the aftermath. Children were showing early-onset joint degradation, each related to the types of work and intensity of physical labor.

Interestingly, despite the preconceived image you may have that factory life was much more physically damaging (at least for the spine), it was actually the children from the rural dairy farming community that showed the highest rates of spinal damage (across all categories).

Taking a closer look, the pattern isn't too surprising: “I was not completely surprised that the individuals from Middenbeemster had significantly more frequent and severe lesions, as we have a good amount of historical data around the dairy farming process in the Netherlands during this period — including accounts from Middenbeemster itself,” Tutwiler said.

Historical accounts record how children partook in even some of the most labor-intensive tasks, such as cheese-making (we may complain if we need to hand-whip cream; now imagine trying to turn liters worth of milk into cheese, for hours on end). Children were also expected to churn the curds, carry the cheese molds, and haul the milk basins, tasks that required heavy lifting and repeated bending and twisting.

“In the cheesemaking community of Middenbeemster, we see a high frequency of lesions in the upper thoracic vertebrae, where the muscles of the shoulder girdle and upper limbs originate,” Tutwiler said. “From this, we can infer that these individuals were overexerting these muscle groups and putting stress and strain onto this region of the spine…”

The finding contrasts with what was seen in England, where the opposite trend occurred: children in factories had greater spinal damage than children living in rural communities. Why?

Well, it may simply be that the physical demands of urban child labor were not consistent in different times and places. Dutch children may have had less strenuous (on the spine) work than their English counterparts and vice versa for rural communities.

This didn’t mean the Dutch children in Arnhem were completely unaffected. Their spines showed the second highest rate of spinal damage. The lower rate may be attributed to the largely sedentary nature of industrial child labor, with most tasks involving swinging, spinning, and carding wool. Though exceptions existed, such as lifting and carrying loads of textiles and raw materials. And what about the affluent children of Delft??

Surely they had no spinal lesions; well, no, they did. They had the lowest incidence of spinal damage, but it still occurred and may be attributed to activities such as riding horses, playing games, and jumping rope. Alternatively, they may have resulted from too little physical activity (it seems life is a two-edged sword).

So, a recent study reveals that the growing spines of Dutch children in the 17th to 19th centuries bore lasting marks of the labor demanded of them, with rural dairy farming leaving the deepest scars of all. Many people have the notion that living a rural life on a farm is peaceful, tranquil, or easy. It isn’t, and for children in the post-medieval period in the Netherlands, it was particularly grueling.

The results are a quiet and sobering reminder that the cost of childhood work wasn't just measured in lost schooling or stolen play, but written into the bones themselves.

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Reference:

Tutwiler, A., & Schats, R. (2026). Built on the backs of children: A comparative analysis of spinal joint disease in non-adults from three post-medieval (1650–1850 CE) Dutch communities with documented histories of child labour. International Journal of Paleopathology, 54, 59-71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpp.2026.07.002