In a similar vein to your anecdote, and pertinent the larger topic, I greatly enjoyed harvest when I was 7 and always missed it when it was over. That's why I became a farmer in adulthood – and I still feel the same way about it. Work (even paid work) doesn't mean unenjoyable.
Yes, these are very significant differences. Children are also given time off with holidays, time to play, etc.
School disgusts me, personally, but it's not even close to child labor.
Is that not also the case for the kids in the article harvesting cocoa? According to the article, they harvested a total of 140 pounds of cocoa for the year. According to Wikipedia, a typical worker can harvest around 150-175 pounds of cocoa in one day.
Even if they are horribly inefficient compared to a typical worker, perhaps in large part because they are having fun and playing at the same time, we're still only talking a handful of days of work each year. You can only drag out the harvest for so long. What do they do the rest of the time?
Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"? Plenty of kids would argue picking fruit was more valuable than algebra homework.
Having kids working a little isn't necessarily bad, it is the conditions under which they work which is important but more subtle issue. In regions of extreme poverty it isn't even the conditions that are often the root problem but the foreign exploiters of the extreme poverty failing to pay a fair wage for human work.
>"I feel sad. I want to be, like, a medical doctor," Munira said. "But my family doesn't have money for school."
It's much easier for corporate overlords to focus on cheap issues like child labor and then make the appearances of trying to do something about it... when the causes of child labor are more like "you pay my family so little I can't afford to go to school and nobody else either so the nearest school is an hour away". If you give people the opportunity to barely stay alive they'll fix these things themselves.