Lukas, I Am Your Father

The role of parents in a child’s life cannot be understated. A two parent household with a healthy sense of well-being has been said to provide more economic, academic and community resources to the child because the household has more salary earners. This gives the child the opportunity to embrace their childhood and not have to worry about acquiring necessary resources for themselves.

 

Unfortunately in the African context, many children grow up not only in a single parent household, but also in a single mother household. This phenomenon peaks in Sub-Saharan Africa whereby 32% of the world’s singleparent households can be found. I found that a 2017 study concluded that African women have two more children than the average woman worldwide. Therefore, it cannot be understated that African families are larger in general, thus the effects of single mother households would be heightened by default.

 

So… why even go in depth about it? If this is a trend across specific regions of the African continent, why try and interfere with how it has always been?

 

I discovered the findings of Jeffrey Scott Steiner, an executive of an American family mediation centre, to be extremely helpful in my understanding of single parenthood struggles. “Drug and alcohol involvement, delinquency, law enforcement troubles, gang participation and educational underachievement” are significantly decreased by the presence of both parents throughout a child’s life, according to Steiner. Structures provided in a traditional household help children feel secure enough to explore the full extent of youth and what it means to be young. 

But the story does not end with the traditional family...

The tribulations of non-traditonal family structures should not be omitted from the conversation. Queer families have also experienced the strenuous effects of single parenthood on not only the child, but also the parent. Namupa Shivute, a Namibian, non-binary single parent of two attributes the patriarchy, capitalism, unpaid gendered labour, unpaid parental labour and a lack of understanding of intersectionality as the factors that society has put in place to make single parenthood undesirable and borderline unrealistic in the real world. 

We are conditioned to believe that it takes a village to raise a child, but that village only exists in a metaphorical sense when looking at parenthood in urban areas. Shivute goes on to describe how we as a society do not compensate the labour of parents, but are willing to punish and shame children when the parental labour has not been properly executed. Shivute laments that although trying to raise her children in a non-gendered household where children can freely exist from gender norms, socialisation kicks in and the efforts to guard her children from perceived limiting beliefs are erased by the need to participate in a homogenised society.   

Single parenthood is still a heavily misunderstood concept and the lack of adequate infrastructure and assistance makes it harder and harder in the modern world. We often shame the single parent for not having a partner and that is not a helpful contribution to the issue. If we really want prioritise the experiences of the child and the parent, making sure their needs are met and giving them an outlet to escape from negative factors in the environment should be paramount in our treatment of single parent households.