Parental absence : intergenerational tensions and contestations of social grants

Abstract: Most recently the role of grandmothers has been highlighted as significant in the lives of their grandchildren. These studies focus on the contribution the old age grant allows grandmothers to make in contexts of poverty, orphan hood and migrant labour. Similar studies on the child grant also illustrate its contribution to the well-being of children and families in general. However missing in these examinations has been an understanding of how these social grants are contested in contexts of parental absence and internal labour migration. Through a thematic content analysis of qualitative interviews with members of migrant’s families from Madibeng, a rural setting in the North-West this article illustrates that, in context of internal labour migration, family responsibilities shift in ways that make unemployed grandmothers who do not receive the old age grant vulnerable. This vulnerability is manifested through a tension in familial relationships. This tensions stem from the contestation of the child support grant between the young labour migrant mothers, the guardian (grandmother) and the recipients of the child support grant (CSG). These tensions the article shows are a result of continuing socio-economic struggles experienced by poor households

Father Contact Following Union Dissolution for Low-Income Children in Urban South Africa

Black fathers in South Africa face enormous challenges remaining involved in their children's lives as a result of very high levels of unemployment and union instability. We use data from the Birth to Twenty (Bt20) cohort study to describe trajectories of father contact in the lives of children who have experienced a parental union dissolution and examine the influence of life stage of child at time of union dissolution and mother's entry into new union on nonresidential contact with fathers. We find that, in the first 5 years after dissolution (1) children who were in the 3 to 5 life stage at time of dissolution face substantially higher odds of having no contact compared with those who were in the 0 to 2 group and (2) children who were in the 6 to 11 group experienced lower odds of intermittent contact. Mother's entry into a new union increases the odds of having no and intermittent contact.