That work and schooling were a trade-off, that work had to take priority for many families, becomes clear from an examination of evidence from the reform era about school attendance patterns and truancy. In general, older children were less likely to attend school than their younger siblings whose labor was not as valuable. Children were more likely to be absent from school in the summer than in the winter, more markedly so in rural than in urban communities. School enrollment and attendance patterns also reflected the gender division of labor among children and adults. By and large, schooling for sons was given priority where children of both sexes were not treated equally, no doubt a reflection of the belief that, insofar as literacy skills were useful, they were more so for boys than for girls... But where the local labor market offered relatively well-paid boys' labor, they attended less assiduously than girls. Of course, these patterns of differentiation in school enrollment and attendance according to age and sex among school-aged children pretty much disappeared as school attendance became almost universal toward the end of the nineteenth century.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 88)