I truly don't know why it was ended, though. It was suddenly decided that that would be it. They never said particularly why, because they were cut off in their prime.
At 21, there's lots more room there, plenty of things to improve on as you get older.
Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.