Just don't know what to do about it.
Most kids do nothing over the summer. They'll work like dogs playing basketball or what they want to do, but as soon as they're asked to rake the yard it's too hot. The rest of the time they mostly sit and thumb-twitch over electronics.
Of course, the school year is set up to provide kids free time during labor-intensive agricultural seasons. We have this idea that childhood is a time of complete inactivity or at the very least obligatorily non-productive effort. Or a time to structure the crap out of their lives and work them in a way that produces nothing but activity and structure. They're not to be productive. They're not supposed to help the family. They're little emperors. Not what the labor laws were intended to do. But we've interpreted them as having this as their goal--to make the children of the poor as indolent as the children of the idle rich.
But Ms. Cuello has a special set of circumstances. Because she wanted more income she let her kids work and try to keep up with her. This isn't uncommon--I know parents who charge their teens food and board. There's a difference between working for the family as part of the family and just being used. Of course, both can be child abuse. Ms. Cuello is abusing her children. It's hard to say (out loud, at least) she's a victimizer, though, because she's also the victim of her circumstances and prior choices and there's this strange idea you can be either victim or victimizer but never both. Still... Three kids. No good education. Left her husband. Three strikes, even if each decision made sense at the time, in isolation, or could have been made to work given other choices and circumstances. She's in over her head. If she's not here legally, add a fourth strike.
Of course, it's easy to say that her kids shouldn't be working like that (and just as easy to say they shouldn't be working at all, or should have eclaires for breakfast every morning on the Riviera--words are cheap). I guess instead the 3 teen girls should be left at home, unattended, while she works in the fields. What could possibly go wrong? Again, she's in over her head--she's racked up responsibilities without having a way to fulfill them.
On the other hand I know a lot of kids who work themselves like dogs. Some lie to their employers. Some forge parent signatures. One kid had a part-time job on the weekend and another during the week, each employer thinking the kid only worked 15-20 hours a week. Their grades suffer because they have no time for schoolwork, they close the restaurant at 11, leave at 11:45, get home after midnight, and are in class at 7:25 am--but all they see is the short-term benefit of that minimum wage job. Pointless gew-gews. A sense of maturity as they make foolish choice after foolish choice and both they and themselves call it "wisdom". They choose to victimize themselves by valuing small short-term gains over large long-term gains. Not being of age, somebody else--say, their parents--is responsible for allowing the self-abuse, but their parents are proud of their little hard-working kid.
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