Child slavery refers to the slavery of children below the age of majority. In the past, many children have been sold into slavery in order for their family to repay debts or crimes or earn some money if the family were short of cash. A scholar retold a story about a mother where, "her predicament shattered the privilege of thinking of her children in purely personal and sentimental terms and caused her to consider whether outsiders might find value in them". Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about a woman who was bought by a slave owner to breed children for him to sell. The expectations of children who were either bought or born into slavery varied. Scholars noted, "age and physical capacity, as well as the degree of dependence, set the terms of children's integration into households".