More than one in five children in the world work. Most of these working children live in poor countries. This paper is concerned with the relationship between current family economic status and child labor in poor countries. There are two distinct strands of research. The first considers whether working while young influences a household's current economic status through the economic contribution of children (Manacorda 2006), and the impact of child labor on local labor markets (Basu and Van 1998). The second examines whether current economic status influences the decision to send children to work. Understanding economic influences on child time allocation is important for the political economy of child labor regulation and the design of child labor policy (Doepke and Zilibotti 2005). This second strand of research is the focus of this paper, which examines child time allocation responses to experimental variation in a cash transfer program in Ecuador.