Why I took out the adjective "miserable" in the headline of the previous New York Times story.

If you check the original New York Times article headline, you'll see that it originally said "Africa Adds to Ranks of Miserable Child Workers". But I took out "miserable" because I suspect that it was an adjective added on by the author; I don't think it accurately describes the emotional state of the child workers in general.

As I mentioned before, children who voluntarily work out of necessity (i.e. not explicitly being forced to by someone else) who can bring in money to feed themselves and their loved ones (not necessarily family since I think it's unclear who their blood family is in these compounds) are much better off than children who go hungry.

What's worse: grinding rocks and getting hurt (which leads to an x% probability of dying) or being more hungry than before (which I argue leads to  > x % probability of dying)?

I mean, there's no easy way to prove that, but that's my intuition.