There are currently around 229 million working children globally, of whom 138 million are engaged in child labor. These two forms of exploitation remained a pervasive social issue, depriving children of their childhood and redirecting their life courses towards disadvantageous outcomes. Existing literature has extensively documented the predictors of child work and labor; however, it falls short of fully capturing the socio-economic, socio-political, and spatial production of this issue despite the national and international efforts and pledges to end it by 2030. This dissertation asks why child work and labor persist across low to middle-income countries and how historical spatial organization shapes the contemporary challenges for children. Building on Marx, Gramsci, and Lefebvre, specifically their ideas on economic base, political and civil society, and social space, this dissertation constructs a socio-spatial dialectical framework and expands our understanding of the persistence of three distinct types of children’s engagement, including social, socio-economic, and economic. This study utilizes round 6 of the multi-indicator cluster survey (MICS), to create a combined dataset of 460, 000 children aged 5-17 from 50 low to middle-income countries (LMICs) and employs the generalized ordered logit regression. The analysis reveals four key findings and validates the theoretical framework. First, the economic base sets the material conditions for children’s engagement. Second, the political society intervenes through infrastructural power. Third, civil society operates as a site of contestation, where negotiations among no work, work, and labor define the lived realities of children. Fourth, the social space in former colonies continued to become more exploitative, trapping children in a spatial trap, thereby validating Lefebvre’s pioneering theoretical argument that “social space is a social product”. This study moves beyond examining the causal relationship between single predictors, such as poverty, and child work and labor, and finds that the issue is an ongoing structural concern rooted in the historical conditionality of colonial extractive space. It concludes that meaningful progress in reducing child work and labor to meet future targets requires targeted structural interventions, differentiated by type of work and labor, guided by the findings of the socio-spatial framework.