Part III Gender as maternal practice and maternal thinking
7.2. Maternal practice: the evidence
7.2.2. Fostering growth
children. The institutional discourse and the practices resonate with Ruddick’s maternal essentialism where, in mothering, primacy is given to children’s demands and the mother-child relationship is ‘naturally’ constituted around the care needs of children. In this way women’s role as primarily that of care giver to children and of fulfilling a ‘reproductive function’ in society, is reinforced and perpetuated.
7.2.2. Fostering growth
Ruddick argues that even though the demand to foster children’s growth is part of maternal practice and is historically and culturally specific, unlike the demand for preservation, it is not primarily a cultural creation but rather is universally true (1989:20-21). She argues that fostering growth in children entails being aware that children have a need for nurturance of their complex emotional and intellectual development and as such, is something mothers’ assume primary responsibility for.
In terms of fostering growth, the prevailing institutional discourse and practices in South Africa put women and families centre stage. Equally, studies have shown that women are overwhelming responsible for childcare arrangements, including the protection of and fostering growth in children, although practices vary according to socio-economic conditions, with significant implications for the quality of the emotional and intellectual development children receive.
7.2.2.1 Fostering growth and childcare in South Africa
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In South Africa women do what Ruddick says they do to nurture emotional and intellectual growth in their children (1989:87). They spend more time than men on childcare activities such as informal teaching and training, accompanying children to places such as school, sports lessons, and so on. (Budlender 2001:69). They take primary responsibility for childrearing, household reproduction, childcare arrangements and often financial support for the household, without significant assistance from the state, workplace or men (Goldblatt 2005:118-119).
Ruddick’s observation that the varying locations and economic status of mothers establish different conditions of growth (1989:86) also holds true in South Africa, where mothers’ responses to children’s need for emotional and intellectual growth are contingent on their varying socio-economic circumstances and influences both their control over and the quality of childcare. South Africa has a high rate of adult illiteracy (Chisholm, Motola and Vally 1999:8). The rate of unemployment amongst women is high (Hassim 2005) and when women are employed, the majority work in low paying jobs with limited or no work related benefits (Goldblatt 2005: 119). Also, they generally have a low participation rate in the workforce, which can, in part, be attributed to child care demands (Biersteker and Kvalsig 2007:159).
Given the above, do parents have the necessary means and knowhow to foster growth in children in the way that Ruddick (1989) assumes? Richter (2004) argues that they don’t, as women who are hungry and economically insecure are also less likely to provide children with adequate emotional care. To adequately foster growth, they need State support.
7.2.2.2. Socio-economic context and fostering growth in children
In South Africa, whether women are employed, unemployed or not economically active, they spend more time than men in unpaid work, which includes childcare (Budlender 2001: 39). However, their ability to do so is being seriously eroded especially by the AIDS epidemic, as breadwinners and caregivers lose their jobs, cannot work at home, are overburdened with caring for sick people, or they themselves become ill and die (Richter, Manegold & Pather 2004). As already indicated, the role of fathers in childcare is minimal for all working women (Department of Health 1998).
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At the same time, in varying proportions, mothers often assign childcare
responsibilities to other people (mainly other women) or childcare institutions. The higher their levels of education the more likely they are to employ private domestic
help and use child care institutions for the care of their children (Department of Health 1998). And where they are economically active, many jobs require that women leave their children elsewhere. Some occupations such as street vending allow mothers to care for their children while they work (albeit under constrained conditions), (Goldblatt 2005:119). Even unemployed mothers need and use alternative childcare arrangements, while they look for jobs or go about daily activities that take them away from their homes and the children in their care (Budlender 1997:26; Goldblatt 2005:119).
Ruddick’s contention that the main task of fostering growth is administrative is generally evident in South Africa. While there are some mothers or carers who make no arrangements at all, leaving children without care (Goldblatt 2005:119), most mothers organise some kind of childcare arrangement when they are unable to care for their children themselves. Their options are significantly influenced by social and economic circumstances, ranging from state, private and charitable crèches to home care by paid childminders to care by other household members, relatives and
neighbours or other unrelated families.
Thus, economically advantaged white and black women are able to transfer the responsibility of childcare onto domestic workers who are employed in over one million households in South Africa and who make up 18 percent of total female employment (Mills 2002). In this, they continue a practice of racial privileging designed to benefit the white minority that was historically established.
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By making alternative childcare arrangements, mothers are doing Ruddick’s
‘administrative tasks’ to foster their children’s growth. They are also demonstrating agency. However, in so doing they often find themselves with little control over the kind of emotional and intellectual climate for growth that their children are placed in.
In other words, these and other care arrangements often barely meet Ruddick’s idea of fostering growth by stimulating cognitive development and creating sociability
based on mothering judgements and guidance such as whether to intervene in
children’s feelings and behaviour, whether to change or to control or wait or listen or to trust, what to permit or not (1989: 84, 85). While Ruddick argues that mothers need to know what their children are up to in order to nurture their developing spirits (p.93), child care arrangements that are extra-mother, as it were, can’t and do not do this in most cases.
Working mothers, who rely on paid or unpaid kinship networks for the care of their children, often express concerns about the lack of mental stimulation provided by their childcare arrangements (Moller 1990). Generally, they are dissatisfied with these (COSATU/Naledi 2005:12) and would prefer quality, institutionalised childcare facilities to appropriately meet the cognitive development needs of their children.
7.2.2.3 Institutional discourse and practice on fostering growth in children – the Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU) Policy
Trade union organisations are a key site where working women and men articulate their desires, expectations and the challenges they face of meeting the growth needs of their children. Their interests are reflected in the demand for parental rights and the negotiated agreements they have attained through collective bargaining. They are also reflected in background and policy documents that inform these demands and practices. The South African Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU) publication, Sharing the Load: The struggle for gender equality, parental rights and childcare (1991), and particularly the chapter entitled For love of our Children exemplifies organised workers’ thinking as it presents both their
experiences of and discourses around childcare.
Their views of childcare echo Ruddick in that children need protection and nurturance.
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“Childcare does not stop when a baby is 12 months old – children need to be cared for until they are of school-going age and, even after that, provision has to be made for after-school care. The kind of care that young children are given is vitally important. They have needs that go beyond being clothed and fed - they also require love and stimulation. Children need to be educated as well as cared for. A work that is becoming popular which expresses this need is educare”
(1991:39).
Like Ruddick, SACCAWU (1991) also argue for the need to foster growth through care that educates.
“The idea of educare arises from the well-known fact that the first six years of a child’s life are the most important time for learning. These early learning experiences help children prepare for school, but equally important, they help prepare children for life by teaching them values and skills that will help them to be better people” (1991:39).
However, unlike Ruddick, SACCAWU (1991) expects that these needs can and should be met institutionally rather than simply within the family and within the interpersonal mother-child dyad. The problem for them is construed as an absence of pre-school facilities to cater for the care and educational needs of working class children. This legacy, they argue has its roots in the political and economic relations that characterised apartheid.
This understanding of where and how to address children’s needs to foster growth is underscored by COSATU initiated campaigns and policies around maternal and parental rights to meet children’s needs for emotional and intellectual growth. For example, in their ‘National Campaign for Childcare’ COSATU encouraged workers to take their children to work in an attempt to get workers, employers and
government to accept that childcare was a social responsibility (p.48-50).
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The emphasis on the need for institutional responses to foster growth and care for children does not preclude ideas about the part that mothers and fathers can and should play in these tasks. What they contend is that it is not enough to shift this burden onto women and especially not into the private domain, not least of all because of its implications for women’s employment. COSATU argues that:
“Women also face hardship in accessing and sustaining participation in the labour market. The majority of women have to juggle careers, domestic responsibilities such as cooking and caring of children. The shortage of
childcare facilities and the sexual division of labour in the home impose serious burdens on women. Maternity leave and pay provision are also inadequate, and in some cases even the legislated minimum is not complied with” (COSATU 2003).
As with Ruddick’s observations about most cultures (1989: 41), in South Africa, women and mothering are conceptually and politically linked. And like her, women in South Africa demand the restructuring of the work place to better attend to the fostering of growth in children, implying both women’s responsibility for mothering and the unfair burden it places on them, to the economic and professional advantage of men (p.45).
To address these issues COSATU developed a Parental Rights campaign,
“to enable women and men in waged work to combine career with full time family life, while infants are given all the care and attention required. The benefits of such a campaign are that it will deliver concrete benefits for working women, it will play an important role in challenging and addressing women’s oppression, it will contribute towards the proper care and early childhood development of infants and children, and it will enable women to be more active as unionists”
(COSATU 2003).
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Some of the core demands of COSATU’s Parental Rights campaign which are highlighted in their Gender Policy around Parental Rights and Childcare are: